I discovered two small things today, neither of which is particularly earth-shattering, but both have some bearing on working with out-of-date hardware.

First, and probably more impressive of the two, is the fact that it takes a 120Mhz Pentium 10 hours to compile tidy. You might know tidy as a venerable tool for arbitrarily cleaning up html code; it’s nothing fancy, has no dependencies, results in about a dozen files in the Crux package. Otherwise, it’s a rather plain program.

Building it took 599 minutes, done over the course of the day, while I was at work. Ordinarily I would compile it on another Crux machine and transplant the package to this one, but my attempt at that this time resulted in errors when I tried to run it on the Pentium. Since it’s a relatively small item, and didn’t seem like it would overwhelm things, I let it start on my way out the door.

And according to the time utility, which I had the foresight to use when I started building, it finished about 10 hours later. What a speed demon. 🙄

The other interesting tidbit is a little more specific to Arch Linux, which I’m using on the Inspiron while it undergoes some changes. Just out of curiosity, I installed both the gnome and the gnome-extra groups, which more or less equates to the minimum for a Gnome desktop. And I trust Arch to keep it very svelte.

Total space required for all those dependencies? Only 1,345Mb, according to pacman.

Maybe that’s not a surprising number, but it was to me. I didn’t really equate Gnome — and only Gnome, although that does include ancillary software and the login manager — as almost a gigabyte and a half. I knew it was chunky, but I didn’t realize it was obese.

But that’s only in my estimation, and I have been called insane about these things. I take it as a compliment.