Old laptop « rullzer

Old laptop

by rullzer on Jan.23, 2008, under Gentoo, Hardware, Linux

So this weekend my girlfriend father pointed out that they had an old laptop lying around. I decided it would be fun to run gentoo on it and use it for anything I could think of. First to give you an impression

Compaq Armada 100s 550 Mhz Cpu 56 meg ram 8 meg video-ram

This laptop is old so that means the CD-ROM does not react that well to CD-R’s. This is bad when you want to boot from a CD-ROM. But I got it working. Now after booting the kernel (nofb ofcourse, and more options). An error messgae kept spamming my screen wich was caused by udev loading the usbmodule (while I gave nousb as one of the options to the kernel). This is not what should happen so I filled a bug (#206954).

The solution was easy just rmmod uhci_usb and it stopped. So that ment no USB support into the kernel. The USB port (yeah only 1) is know to be broken on this laptop I read on other sites.

Now since I wanted to use the laptops full potential I ofcourse changed the CHOST etc. But a downside ofcourse was that gcc and glibc needed to be recompiled….. It is compiling gcc for 10 hours straigt now. And I have no idea how long it will keep on going. But if it isn’t finished in another 10 hours It will be killed and I have to think of something else.

I’ll keep you posted on the process with this laptop.

4 Comments for this entry

Zeth
January 23rd, 2008 on 3:30 am
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with drobbins, and the Word was distcc.
rullzer
January 23rd, 2008 on 10:24 am
You are right about that.
However gcc doesn’t use distcc. It bootstraps all by himself. And other than that I do not have i586 machines hooked up to my network. Most is amd64. But i’ll look into cross compiling since else it will take a long time indeed.
Dirk Gently
January 23rd, 2008 on 12:15 pm
I have a 300mhz processor and it took 3 days to compile up to Gnome. 10 hours for gcc is about right.
Daniel Vanleuven
December 6th, 2011 on 3:04 pm
I’m still learning from you, but I’m trying to achieve my goals. I certainly liked reading all that is written on your website.Keep the stories coming. I liked it!