Hi, I have been installing gentoo on my desktop for the past few weeks. (Not a whole lot of time to get to it) and I must say that I wished I had made the move a whole lot earlier. Anyway, my next canididate for gentoo would be my ibook g3 which has a slow processor. I have heard that for these systems cross compiling is a lot better of an option than compiling on the system itself. I have read the cross-compiling guide and am left a bit confused. Could I use my thumbdrive to transfer compiled binaries from my desktop to my laptop and install the packages that way? Also, what would I do when updates come out for my laptop. Is there any way of monitoring the package statuses?

Hi
All I can say about cross-compiling is that I tried to compile sparc64-binaries on a amd64-PC and that resulted in a huge mess. I think I will give it a shot again sometimes in the future but for the time being I don't feel like telling other people to do the same.

I installed Gentoo a few weeks back on a netbook having an Atom 270 and it worked fine - it just lasted 4 times longer than usual, but it was still acceptable.

What you could do instead of cross-compiling is to use "distcc" when you emerge something. "distcc" is fully transparent to "emerge" and it spreads out the compilation as well to other PCs connected to your network.
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/distcc.xml

I used it on some PCs and it worked fine and it is for sure easier to use than cross-compiling, especially once you have a working environment.
The guide for distcc for cross-compiling: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/cross-compiling-distcc.xml
Hope it helps!