On Wed, 2003-09-24 at 11:13, Joshua Banks wrote:
> > > > I ran into a problem when trying to install Gentoo on a 4gig drive.
> > FYI I am running Gentoo + XFree86 + apps on a 4gig drive at the moment.
> Thats re-assuring. Not sure what happened last time but I'll be sure to let everyone 
> know how it
> goes this time. Not that anyone cares but maybe a noob like myself might. :P

Don't give up :-) It took me 4 or 5 attempted installs to get Gentoo
working. Granted, for the most part I was trying to install on *old*
machines (like a Pentium 90 with 32MB RAM), but I think I will even be
able to get Gentoo to install on that now, I'll have to try that soon
:-)

Probably the best advice I can give is to make sure your machine has
enough memory, either in the form of RAM or swapdisk space. I found,
compiling on older machines that my installes often failed because the
machine ran out of memory. I would suggest at least 256MB of memory in
total, (ie made up of swap space and RAM). I am not sure how accurate
this figure is...

If you are going to need/use large swap space when compiling, but don't
need a large amount of swap for normal, everyday use, you can
repartition after the install. What I did was:

In partitioning my drive I wanted a /home partition of ~800MB, but
during the install I made it a bit smaller and used the extra space for
a secondary swap partition so I had two swap partitions:
* my primary swap (64MB)
* install (secondary) swap of 192MB
(and so my /home partition during the install was 800 - 192 = 608MB)

After the install I copied anything which was on the /home partition to
/tmp (or anywhere else you like) and deleted the /home and secondary
swap partitions (remembering to turn the swap off before of course :-)
and created a new partition in it's place (the new /home of 800MB
leaving me with the first swap space of only 64MB). I then formatted the
new home partition and moved all the /home files back to their proper
place. If you do this you will also have to change your /etc/fstab file
to reflect the new partition scheme, otherwise your /home partition
won't be mounted on startup.

My /etc/fstab look like this (minus all the other stuff):
/dev/hda1               /boot           ext3            noauto,noatime 
0 2
/dev/hda2               /               reiserfs        noatime        
0 1
/dev/hda3               none            swap            sw             
0 0
/dev/hda5               /tmp            ext3            noatime        
0 2
/dev/hda6               /var            ext3            noatime        
0 2
/dev/hda7               /home/sojourn   ext3            noatime        
0 3
/dev/hda8               /home/home   ext3            noatime         0 3
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0      /mnt/cdrom      iso9660         noauto,ro      
0 0

So basically my setup is:
hda1 (/boot)= 32MB
hda2 (/) = 1.2gig
hda3 (swap) = 64MB
hda5 (/tmp) = 64MB
hda6 (/var) = 128MB
hda7 (/home/sojourn) = 128MB
hda8 (/home) = ~800MB

FYI: the oldest machine I have installed Gentoo on is a Cyrix M II
300mhz, 64MB RAM, 2.6G HDD.

Of course, this might not the best way for *you* to do it, but it worked
for me :-)
Brett




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