I have been very much tempted to try out Gentoo...But have been a bit reluctant as most of the users threaten about the compilation time and that it could take days before a working gentoo is installed..

I thought If I could start off with a Sabayon core (which already has kernel pre compiled) and then use portage for other apps? Would it be a good idea?

Also for huge packages like openoffice is there any shortcut or I should face a big hurdle in terms of compilation time?

I have a rather old pentium Pro with 512 MB ram only...Also , I cannot leave the Internet on for more than a couple of hours ...So I cannot wait for days together...

Yes you can.
But I strongly advice you to read up on how to use Portage.

There is a pre-compiled openoffice (or libreoffice) in Portage called openoffice-bin. (Same counts for firefox-bin and chromium-bin).

Have fun.

That will entirey depend on your machine and the software you want to compile. On a P2, openoffice alone could take more than one day to compile. It will be a long trip, that's for sure.

I am not sure what do you have in mind. But you could just use Sabayon. In any case, don't forget that Sabayon is not Gentoo. It's heavily modified from the core and most Gentoo developers will refuse to give assistance unless you can reproduce the same problem(s) in a pure Gentoo installation.

As the other user above said, use openoffice-bin instead, unless you have a network and you can spend some time setting up distcc to do distributed compilation.

You could always use "emerge -pf whatever >mylist.txt " to get a list of the packages to download, fetch them elsewhere, and then put them into /usr/portage/distfiles/, that way portage won't need to download anything.

Hi,
Yes, as others are saying it depends on your hardware. On my AMD 1.2 Ghz machine, I use openoffice-bin for this reason. It still takes over night to make a monthly update to the system.

On modern hardware a whole build can be done within a few hours, including openoffice and browsers. Of course I think people who use gentoo are generally interested in configuring most aspects of their system.

If you just want to compile a few things yourself, maybe also try arch linux, it also support portage (used to manage the installed packages and available source code for compilation).

Mons

Clever idea!