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na85

I remember thinking my 966MHz Coppermine was blazing fast.

Then, a few years later I tried to install Gentoo on it. With X. And OpenOffice.

It chugged for days.

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I still have an old ThinkPad with a 500MHz Pentium III and 128Mb of RAM in it. It has FreeBSD on it (4.4).

It still feels really fast if you don't use X.

That's awesome.

I lost that poor little machine when I moved across the country; not sure where it could have ended up. Now my only "system to screw around with" is my RasPi.

I remember doing some intro comp.sci homework on a hand-me-down Pentium 2 laptop. It sort of managed to run X11 (in 8bit greyscale!) -- but the jdk took literally 5 minutes to start up (compilation time was effectively bounded by the star-up time: It took 5 minutes until I had my .class files, or my list of syntax errors...).

I wonder if gcj might have been faster for compiling your homework?

Interesting question. I think the problem was the 4(or 8?) MBs of ram, and javac swapping out while loading. I can't recall that I did any compiling with gcc on that laptop -- at the time gcj certainly wasn't mature enough. I don't think I tried with jikes either, for some reason -- can't remember why now.

Come to think of it, it might have been a 486, not a p 2.

I did a similar thing. My P2-233 (at the time this was the top end) blew a PSU and I did my engineering writeup on a P66 (pulled from a campus skip) with 32Mb of RAM using heirloom nroff, eqn, pic and vi on FreeBSD because it was all I had access to and you couldn't compile TeX on that box in a week. I have a lot of respect for the troff family of tools and still use them now.

Cost of software and hardware for that was £0!

The first PC I had with X installed was a 486SX/25MHz with 20 MB of RAM. On the rare occasion that I "needed" to use X, I would start it, do whatever I needed to, kill X, and return to the console.

I still spend most of my time in a terminal window, but it's on a machine with ~1120x as much CPU horsepower and ~1638x as much RAM. Just calculating that made me go "wow" and realize how far we've come in the last 20 years or so.

You compiled it? Why? Why not compile on a different architecture thats faster or use distcc to make a compile farm? Last times I used Gentoo I just used the packages, took no longer to install than an rpm based distribution.

>You compiled it? Why?

Learning exercise

>Why not compile on a different architecture thats faster or use distcc to make a compile farm? Last times I used Gentoo I just used the packages, took no longer to install than an rpm based distribution.

Well this was 10 years ago. I was 17 or so and I didn't know about distcc. I was young, dewy-eyed, and a huge noob.

Back when I was touring colleges, building Gentoo from Stage 1 seemed to be all the rage. I tried on a PIII also. Then the power went out after a day and I never tried it again after. While maybe it would have been a good experience, ultimately I don't think I missed out on all that much.

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