On Tue, 2005-06-14 at 22:59 -0500, cothrige wrote: > * W.Kenworthy ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > > Gentoo is not designed to save space, or rather isnt worried about space > > is a better way to describe it. > > Well, I can understand this. With modern machines who exactly is > using the kind of drive I am right now? Yesterday in the local > Circuit City I noticed that you cannot even buy a 40 gig drive > anymore. Just too small I guess. > > Just like the installation itself. Now just everybody it seems has a > broadband connection and so that is how things work. But people like > me living on dial-up, sad huh?, cannot install an entire system > downloading it a bit at a time. It would take a year.
It doesnt - my first machine (a 200M cyrix with 4.3G disk) took a week over dialup to full destop for a stage 1 install (gentoo 1.1a in 2001(?) I think it was - machines still running, though the hardware and software has evolved over time - to emphasise, never reinstalled but evolved!). Up until recently, this and a number of other machines were maintained over the same dialup link (hint, use a local cache for portage and distfiles). Broadband is nice, but gentoo over dialup is about being smarter! Things like build one system and copy, never delete distfiles, have another machine to build/store things if neccessary. Start by downloading a stage3 file to get all the packages for the basic system, then the remaining package download is not so onerous. Build/download in parrallel - takes care and manual oversight but can be done. Be smart about caching (i.e., use squid etc). Use QOS on the dialup, set the rsync/wget bandwidths to less than the pipe size so the links still usable while downloading. Once built, maintenance is not a problem except with big files like OO - manual download by torrent is the answer here. the tweaks and tricks are endless - most of them I learnt using a dialup - necessity is the mother of invention! However now I have broadband I find that I can afford to be lazier/wasteful but I learnt a lot at before I got the luxury. BillK -- [email protected] mailing list
