On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 11:54 AM, James Homuth<[email protected]> wrote: > I just got Gnome set up completely on a 5-year-old laptop with 512 MB of RAM > running on a P4, and am sort of halfway in the middle of playing with it. In > the process, I'm discovering I still need to install a few things. Just one > problem. I emerge said things, and the system flatlines until such time as > the compilation(s) are done--load is currently sitting at 2.1+. Are there > any make.conf settings I can tweak so that I can still actually use the > system while things compile, or would I be better off setting things to > compile, throwing in a movie, and coming back when they're done? Thanks for > any pointers.
I've always set portage niceness to 19 (the maximum) on every Gentoo system I've ever built and compiling is usually not noticeable at all. I think in your case the biggest problem would be RAM, since compiling often uses hundreds of megs at a time.
