Minimum Gentoo Hardware Requirements

Question

What are the minimum system requirements to be able to run Gentoo Linux effectively?

Solution 1

Gentoo compiles all the packages upon installing. That means fast processor and at least 512 megs of memory, to get reasonable compile times. Otherwise your installs will be very long and bring your system to a crawl.

It should however be noted that you can configure your installation to compile the packages on another computer that you set up for it, allowing you to use extremely old hardware if you have a server in your network. A similar approach is used to run Gentoo on Raspberry Pi...

Solution 2

I've run Gentoo (fairly recently) on a Pentium 233MHz with only 64MB of RAM. Nothing was fast, and it was vital that there was some swap space since nearly every compile would use up all of the system's memory, but it did work. I can't recommend it, but I would say Gentoo will run on just about any machine.

A much better way to do this would likely be to use a faster machine and distcc to help the compiling process.

Solution 3

Pretty much just having a computer will let you run Gentoo. Lol.

But seriously, it depends on what you want to do. You should ask yourself what WM/DE you are going to use, what programs you want to use, if you want to watch HD videos, etc. If you install Gentoo using the automated kernel configurer (can't remember what it's called), then install KDE, Firefox3 with 300 plugins, etc., it's gonna be slow unless you have a fast computer. However, if you install Gentoo, customize the kernel, use a WM like openbox or fluxbox, use very lightweight programs in general, then it will be fast.

Hope that helps. You may want to be a bit more specific on what exactly you want to use the computer for to get better specs.

Comments

[Ярослав Рахматуллин]

Intel E6600 (oc at 3GHz) seems fast enough even today. 4GB of RAM is a must. The faster your drives, the better. A person I talked to in the past ran Gentoo on a Pentium 3 with 700MHz, and it took them about a day to compile KDE 3. I would not call that effective.

[Sasha Chedygov]

"Fast" is very relative. Could you be a little more specific?

[Alex Bolotov]

They say that you need at least 486 gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=2

[kwutchak]

distcc is wonderful for low-powered machines.

[Adam Luchjenbroers]

distcc could quite effectively mitigate that compile time. The sheer range of configurations makes it hard to pin down true system requirements. X + Blackbox would probably run effectively on an original Pentium.

[cd1]

the automated kernel configurer is called "genkernel" (gentoo.org/doc/en/genkernel.xml)

[extropy]

Have used it as server with PIII 500 Mhz, a month worth of updates usually compiles in some 3 hours. And that is with very little software installed. I would recommend at least dual core 2+ Ghz for desktop usage. Updating KDE takes about 10-15 hours on my single core 1.8 GHz CPU.

[qdot]

genkernel actually allows you to customize the kernel.

[qdot]

Also, I doubt modern glibc would launch on 386.

[Tamara Wijsman]

Added a paragraph which could be interesting for people that if you have multiple machines.