Brief: To investigate methods of running distcc on a variety of machines to assist installing gentoo at the upcoming gentoo mini installfest.
Requirements: *gcc version close to that currently used by gentoo stable (3.2.2) *distcc *easy to boot, configure and get on the network I have been playing with bootable cd's and stuff, and made a custom gentoo boot cd with distcc included, using the gentoo livecd-ng script. However it doesn't create the same cd as the current gentoo downloadable iso, in that the current official gentoo iso uses the (Claus Knopper's) hwsetup program to do hardware detection, same as knoppix (although the surrounding scripts are different). The cd I built didn't have that knoppix-like detection, although it did detect my commonplace network card, which is probably enough for our purposes. It also didn't detect pcmcia which is a shame as some people have said they will bring laptops for helping with compiles. OTOH there is also knoppix which has distcc on it and gcc 3.2.3. There is also a recent gentoo boot cd with distcc on the gentoo mirrors, I have yet to investigate that. One thing I am not sure of is whether the difference between gcc 3.2.2 and 3.2.3 will make a difference. If it does, and if knoppix cd's are the choice to make then we can custom build some knoppix cd's with gcc 3.2.2 perhaps. For the LTSP non cd machines there is the option of installing knoppix on the hard drive and replicating it via the server using g4u. From what David posted this afternoon, that sounds feasible. To make the image smaller (to aid quick replication) we can uninstall major packages like X (which should uninstall kde and heaps of other stuff). However another thought was some sort of etherboot for these machines. However the only experience I have with that is LTSP, where the client really acts as an X terminal only. Am I right in saying that in the LTSP case basically everything bar the kernel and X run on the server, so that would not be what we want at all for this exercise. (What we want is gcc/distccd running on all the machines, not just one server!) Can anyone think of a way to run it all on the "client" end. Maybe this is the sort of thing Matthew (was it Matthew?) was taliking about onlist yesterday. All comments appreciated. --
