I recently decided to test out an installation of Gentoo using the Universal installation disc and the packages cd as I do not have a high speed internet connection.
I used a somewhat older machine, 450Mhz Pentium III with 128M of RAM, and an old 3G hard drive which I had an installation of Slackware 9.1 on. Since I had a fairly full install of that OS on it, including a Gnome and KDE, I felt comfortable that I would have plenty of room to at least run a good test of the major packages. However, that turned out not to be true. I followed the instructions to the letter, even down to using all the defaults such as partitions. I had hoped to get a more expected and typical result that way with fewer questions of problems caused by my creativity. I finished the basic install and configuration, and started installing from the packages cd. I use emacs, and so installed that according to the instructions given. I noticed that this installed xorg as a dependency and so configured that and installed fluxbox. Things really seemed very solid at this point and other than not being sure how to automatically start my networking services and probe for my NIC I felt that it was much more operable "out of the box" than I had expected. But then I looked my disk usage. With only emacs and fluxbox installed on top of the basic system I had only a couple of hundred megs of disk space left. Out of 3 gigs this seemed a bit much. No hope of installing either Gnome or KDE and this on a disk which had held both under Slack. Is this typical? Should I expect Gentoo to take up significantly more space than other distros, even with a binary only installation? I have installed both Debian and Slackware on less than 3 gigs more than once and have generally been able to install Gnome at the least. What causes such a difference in this case? Is there something I can trim? patrick -- [email protected] mailing list
