Originally posted by: nweaver
That's not so bad...want real pain? Gentoo 2005 on a P2 400.....Stage 1.
I tried Gentoo on a old 200mhz laptop once. Just to see how long it would take.
Took 3 days of constant compiling, maybe 4. Crapped out when it ran out of room on the harddrive for all the X Windows patches it tried to download... It seemed like their was gigs of that crap.
But I wasn't use the laptop for anything, so it only wasted the laptop's time and not mine. I probably put less then 10minutes of effort into it.
Windows XP takes a long time to isntall. There is no doubt about it... Maybe you could get it done in a hour if everything goes perfectly and your using a disk with SP2 preisntalled on it. Otherwise you spend a great deal more time rebooting the system then anything else.
My favorite method of install is to do a ftp-based install on Debian. If I pick a good and fast mirror I can get 300-400 kB (bytes) out of the download and it's done in no time. Lot faster then downloading a big ISO image. And only one reboot is needed, or two if you need a newer kernel and everything is completley up to date as you install it. (but I don't realy know how long it takes because the install is going on unattended the majority of the time... )