Just remember to delete /usr/portage/distfiles if you have disk constraints. When your system is built, you can safely delete all those source tarballs and live rather happy. Also there is an emerge flag to clean up after install, cant remember it offhand though. A fresh install will use quite nearly a gig or more of source files in /usr/portage/distfiles , all depending on your use flags. All that can be deleted, as you likely wont need the source to gcc or glibc for compiling a itty bitty app. Also, /var/db/pkg/* could be deleted, but you may wanna dive the forums of gentoo to make sure, as that is all the ebuild config files, though small, it's a lot of stuff when you have kde, X, apps, base system.
I have a (somewhat) functional server on a dual p90 with 1gig and a 3gig disk. /boot & / are on the 1giger, and /usr and swap are on the 3. And I have lots of room to spare for general stuff, not a whole lot of /home space avail, but since its just a dhcp, dns, smp/openmosix cluster. Not much is needed. Gentoo = happy Gentoo = lots of install time, it isn't just a couple of cd's worth of packages. Its your personal time to type stuff in, then let the processor do the rest of the work. And for the total of 7.65 minutes of typing, there is anywhere from 3-40+ hours of compile time, so really it could be considered an "un-attended install". Sorta... Gentoo rocks, and the only distro to come close from a "it just works the first time". Other than Mandrake 8.1 or RedHat 8.x Have fun with Gentoo, and perhaps it could be a presentation topic for a future meeting? (If I can ever get to one, or borrow a decently fast laptop to showcase an install) Cheers Chris -----Original Message----- From: Keith Robinson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, August 11, 2003 22:55 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: (clug-talk) Gentoo 1.4 -- taking the plunge I've been running Mandrake since 7.1 as my primary home workstation. As i've written here before I've become increasingly frustrated by the RPM system. It locks me into apps and configs I don't want. So, increasingly I install a bad mix of precompiled RPMs, source RPMs and source files. Obviously I am looking for trouble on a system that must be trouble free. So, recently I fried my glibc and everything I tried with rpm caused seg faults. So in a fit of stoopidity then deleted the contents of /var/lib/rpm. For those of you who use any RPM based distro, don't delete the contents of /var/lib/rpm. Look: [EMAIL PROTECTED] rpm]# rpm -qa [EMAIL PROTECTED] rpm]# Yeehaw. Can not install or upgrade any rpm package cause the system thinks none are installed so all dependencies are unmet. so, when I saw the note on this group that gentoo 1.4 was ready for my taking I thought I'd give it a try on a different machine -- an HP Netserver LC3, dual PIII450 with 4 4.3 Gb SCSI drives. This is also my first experience in working with a dual CPU machine or with SCSI. It is now my 4th day with Gentoo. I have never had so much fun. Everything about it makes sense, respects the user and gives the user the tools and the info what we need. I suspect in due time i will switching my main machine to Gentoo. One thing though -- Gentoo is a huge disk hog. I've spent a lot of time sizing partitions and sym linking directories to allow for how much storage it requires. As in most things Linux i consider myself a complete newbie. if I can get this stuff to work most anyone can. It just requires a lot of work and time. -- -- Keith Robinson "We are enthusiastic yet humble workers." Pablo Neruda
