CHOST Question

[lokoalex]

Approximately how long is the Gentoo installation going through all the Stages?

[lakerdonald]

well, a stage1 install CAN take quite awhile. but not always
there are a few variables:
which processor are you using? how many processors do you have? how much ram do you have? are you using distcc or just plain old cc?

[lokoalex]

I have an ibuddie desknote 733 MHz 512mg Ram 10gig hard drive. Im using distcc I think.
Also is there any way that I can stop what Im doing and shut down my laptop and start where I left off. This install is about to take me more than 3 hours.

[kyku]

I have an ibuddie desknote 733 MHz 512mg Ram 10gig hard drive. Im using distcc I think.
Also is there any way that I can stop what Im doing and shut down my laptop and start where I left off. This install is about to take me more than 3 hours.

Seems like long to me... On my Athlon 1600 256mb big programs like X server, Firefox took 2-3 hours each to compile, to say nothing about things like KDE. And yes you can interrupt in the middle and resume later.

[variant]

on that laptop you would expect to be compiling the base system for about an hour and a half if you do a stage 2 stage one i would allow 4 - 5 hours for.. stage three you could do in about 40 minnuits :) of course that would only account for the base system you wont have xfree or anything installed which for a really complete desktop type system can take days to achieve but yes you can split it up over any length of time (fyi firefox takes about 40 minnits to compile with -03 optimisation on my athlon 1.4GHz:P)

[maol9883]

On my DELL D800 (laptop) it took almost 12h to get a full running desktop (stage3). By that I mean setting keymaps, sound, coreutils, coldplug plus emergeing X, ALSA, Fluxbox, OpenOffice, XMMS, Mplayer, GAIM, Gkrellm etc.

Most of the time was spent waiting so I installed the base system in about 2-3 h (including setting up X, Nvidia and Fluxbox) and had Portage compile everything while I was sleeping.

1400 MHz
768 Mb DDR
10 Mbit connection
bla blah blah

I'm still not sure why I'm running Gentoo instead of Debian though. Gentoo has been more of a hassle, I think that's why And I wanted to learn more about Linux. It's been a highly educational ride I'll say!

Still the ability to customize everything is quite cool, even though I'm nowhere near competent enough to actually benefit from it *yet*. I've spent a lot of time on the forums reading and asking. I believe I'm starting to get the hang of the basics now...

[lokoalex]

If I shut my laptop down is there any way that I can start where I left off? For instance if I shut off my laptop right after bootstrapping the system. Can I start off where you progress from stage 2 to stage 3.

[sarumont]

If I shut my laptop down is there any way that I can start where I left off? For instance if I shut off my laptop right after bootstrapping the system. Can I start off where you progress from stage 2 to stage 3.

As long as you let each step complete, then you're OK. In your case (you bootstrapped) do this after booting the LiveCD and mounting your partitions:

chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash && env-update && source /etc/profile && emerge system

That will start you rolling on your system emerge. Feel free to do an emerge -av system to see what it wants to install (in case you want to mask, change USE flags, etc.).

[lokoalex]

What should I set my CHOST setting to when doing a stage1 installation. I have an iBuddie A900 and it has a
1 GigaPro Mobile CPU
EBGA packing
Full speed 128KB L1/64KB L2 cache
100/133MHz FSB support
Enhanced 3DNow! & MMX technology
0.15micron manufacturing processor.

Should I use this:
Pentium MMX (Intel)

CHOST="i586-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=pentium-mmx -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
CXXFLAGS="-march=pentium-mmx -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"

[bigjohn]

Approximately how long is the Gentoo installation going through all the Stages?

I did a fair bit of investigation before installing gentoo. So I had already found out that it can take considerable time.

Hence I cheated with a stage 3 + GRP - not that it was really a cheat, because about a week after getting my disc's "they" changed to 2004.3 (my discs are 2004.2).

Soooooooo, when it came time for me to do the inevitable

#emerge --update --deep world

It took a mere 60 or so hours to download and compile all the various updates.

So i'm now looking into how much it's gonna cost me to get hold of about half a dozen identical 4 processor boards, that'll support the fastest P4's I can lay my hands on, along with about 2 or 3 gig's of ram per board, plus matching raid arrays (5 x 250 gig hdd's), all plugged into a personal T1 line - In my dreams :o

Did I mention that this will be after I've won this weekends lottery?

regards

John

p.s. the 60 hours comment was with a system with a 2 gig P4, 768 meg of ram etc etc - a mediocre system that does the job - eventually!