Duane Attaway wrote:

>Redhat 4.1 was my first when it came out.  I was hooked and later tried
>suse, slack, mandrake, and attempted debian.  At the moment, I'm a gentoo
>junkie.  In my very biased opinion, I found gentoo the easiest
>distribution to install and use (try installing and actually using redhat
>on an old P120 with 32MB of ram...)
>

Yes, but how many weeks did it take to compile and install on a system 
like that??

>Its great being able to recompile the system to be sleek and agile like a
>light weight race car or every bit as rough and tough like a Mac dump
>truck.  Since all the tools are laid out like a well kept machine shop, it
>begs me to tinker with the code, learn, and build the most interesting
>things.  I found gentoo to be highly addictive and haven't found a way to 
>break the habit yet.  There's nothing more satisfying than compiling lines 
>of fresh code.  It lifts the spirits, cures the blues, and they haven't 
>outlawed the GPL (yet.)
>
And what do you occupy yourself with while you recompile the system and 
other code?

I installed gentoo on my P200 with 128MB ram and it took 3 days just to 
compile X and KDE, and a full day and a half to install - and this was 
going off the stage 3 install!!  The compiling kept throwing errors, and 
I never was able to get KDE compiled - I ended up having to change the 
optim lines in /etc/make.conf (to something less than optimal), and that 
fixed some errors, but still wouldn't compile right.

I'm convinced that Gentoo is not for older machines at all - throw a 
binary distro on those - something fast, like Slack.  Gentoo is for 
workhorse boxes, boxes that can compile the kernel in under 2 min. 
 Gentoo would be great on a box like that - it'd be nothing to compile 
code on say, an Athlon XP 1.4Ghz with 512MB ram.  But after my 
experience on my P200 w/128MB, there'd be no way in the world I'd even 
try and attempt it on a P120 w/32MB...

Just my 2 cents...

-Lucas