On 4/21/22 08:02, Dex Conner wrote: > On 22/04/21 09:09AM, Michael Orlitzky wrote: >> On Thu, 2022-04-21 at 15:49 +0300, Dex Conner wrote: >>> Hi everyone, >>> >>> So I've found a Thinkpad X200 online and I'm thinking of buying it for >>> libreboot purposes. Do you think the P8600 cpu can handle all the >>> compiling on gentoo? For the record, I don't have any of the "big stuff" >>> like KDE, GNOME, Firefox (all I have is Tor Browser [which I don't >>> compile], dwl and some terminal programs like neomutt and profanity). >>> Surely, I wouldn't be spending 5 hours to do small upgrades, >>> right?..right? >>> >>> >> >> It's getting harder and harder. There's always GCC, which is going to >> take you most of the day to build and will probably require -j1 to keep >> you from running out of memory. But aside from that, the big ones are >> >> * dev-lang/rust: pulled in by anything that needs SVG support unless >> you unmask an old insecure version of librsvg or can tolerate half- >> broken SVG support. This takes over 24h, requires -j1, and gets >> worse every day because it bundles all of its (growing list of) >> dependencies. >> >> * LLVM: needed by rust, some video cards, and certain picky packages. >> This one is at least _legitimately_ large but has annoying point >> releases every once in a while that trigger a rebuild for little >> benefit. Again, expect ~24h. >> >> * net-libs/webkit-gtk: if you're avoiding firefox (which is huge, >> and requires rust, which is huge), then this is your best bet for >> a browser engine. Even if you don't use it directly, other apps >> like evolution (mail client) can pull it in. It too is huge, just >> not as bad as the others. This one finishes in something like 18h >> for me. >> >> Everything else that's packaged well and uses a sane programming >> language shouldn't give you much trouble. > > LLVM is annoying even on my current machine but I already avoid rust > with rust-bin and I don't have webkit-gtk. I'm wondering much of a remedy > using a T400 with quad core mod would be to that 24h compile time. Not sure > if it would be worth the 50-70 bucks, though. That's more than what the > computer costs! Do you have any other (more powerful) machines at home that you could set up as a distcc cluster? I've run Gentoo on a T420 and X220 (so two generations newer than your X200), using my home desktop [i7-6700K] as a distcc host for updates. It's livable, but definitely the kind of thing where I'd kick off an emerge --update and leave it running for several hours while I'm doing something else. I've also upgraded mine to 8GB RAM which helps with certain builds.
In addition to the usual problem packages others have called out, the main problem I ran into was heat dissipation: the X220 chassis is so small that railing the CPU at 100% for hours on compiles was pushing the temperature over 90 degrees celsius. I disassembled the laptop and applied new high quality thermal paste to the CPU/heatsink and it seems to be doing a little better now. cal
