I just installed Gentoo 2004.1 from pre-compiled binaries onto a fresh machine so thought it might be useful report some stats for thos intending to come along.
The target machine is a Dell Optiplex GX100 with 128M RAM and 6.5G hard drive, 466MHz ($159 from Computer Broker). I bought the machine as a replacement firewall because it was powerful and quiet, but may now give it to my son and use his P166 for the firewall. The box had no CDROM so instead of spending 10 minutes putting an old one in, I spent 2 or 3 hours booting from various boot floppies to find one that supported everything I needed to get to the point of downloading the stage3 tarball from my other machine, untarring it (grrr not many boot floppy tar implementations support bzip2), and chrooting into the install (grrrr many boot floppy kernels do not support chroot properly). Anyway once that was done the install went smoothly. I used as much "automation" as possible, using genkernel to sort out my kernel and using pre-compiled binaries where possible. I had the basic system up and running yesterday, and the pre-compiled binary cd-iso downloaded overnight. Again there was the "no cdrom" problem so I simply mounted the iso as a loop device in my apache htdocs tree and told the target system to download the binaries it needed from there. I did emerge -g kde to download and install the large 90 odd required packages for kde (including xfree of course) before breakfast and it had finished by the time I had eaten my bacon and eggs and done some breakfast. later i did emerge -g openoffice-bin and it did that in reasonable time too. Summary of disk usage: basic system, no X - 1.5G with kde - 2.5 G with OOo - 2.9G These figures include the space taken up by the binary packages and source packages (for the few extra things I have installed via compilation, and the kernel), which may now be deleted: opti root # du -sh /usr/portage/packages/ 352M /usr/portage/packages opti root # du -sh /usr/portage/distfiles/ 47M /usr/portage/distfiles ie about 400M could safely be deleted.
