Gentoo

[Marc P.]

Originally Posted by kid robusto

Ok the machine i want to put it on is a P1 @200/233 with 192 meg of ram, 2ish gig HDD, and soem other crap. my next queston is i saw read about universal Live Cd, but i cant seem to find it on any FTPs, and i see the stage ones for the i686 and the x86's are only like 15 or 20 megish, is that right for size?

I'd definitely go with a stage 3 on a pentium I. Starting from stage 1 would probably take up to a week to bootstrap on a machine that slow, with not much of a performance gain compiling. I'd also recommend against a heavy window manager, if you intend to install X. Modern versions of KDE and Gnome would probably border unusable in terms of performance on that sort of machine.

I run gentoo on my laptop and one of my desktops. It's a great distribution, the application management is great (I'd argue easier than RPMs in many cases), the performance is great, and the documentation is wonderful. The best place to start is the Gentoo x86 Installation Handbook, and the stages are avaliable on any of the mirrors, but here's a quick link.

Good luck and happy Gentoo-ing!