Is it a good idea to install Gentoo on a weak machines?
 

I have got a few weak machines such as an Asus EEE PC and an old desktop with following parameters:

- Power supply: Tracer Lux TRO-788 400W
- Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-VM900M
- Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 1,8 GHz
- RAM: 1 GB DDR2 533/Kl
- Hard drives:
- - 3 TB Seagate,
- SD card reader
- Samsung DVD-/+R/RW
- Radeon X800 GTO 256MB
- Floppy disk drive

I love Gentoo <3 but it takes a lot of time to compile everything. Is it a good idea install Gentoo on weak machines or better try install Slackware, FreeBSD?

Other than the low amount of RAM, I wouldn't call that a "weak machine". You really need to upgrade the amount of RAM the machine in question has if you want to run any heavy graphical environments.

You could always just install a lightweight distribution such as (but not limited to) antiX, etc. If you can't upgrade the amount of RAM in that machine(s), then I'd recommend you use at least a lightweight graphical environment. As it's the graphical environment that's going to take up the most resources like RAM.

Why do you use gentoo ?. If you can't answer that in a way that's relevant to the hardware it runs on, what's the point ?.

No-one else can answer that for you.

isn't there a lot of compiling happening on gentoo?
maybe an oldish intel core duo and only 1GB of RAM would make that a rather painful experience. but then, isn't gentoo always? :D

Gentoo is completely source based so yes, everything gets compiled on Gentoo, even the compiler. Ram may be an issue as others have said so bumping that up will help. You will need a lot of TIME. Big packages like webkitgtk, firefox, libreoffice, can takes days on a machine with your specs. You may not be able to compile some things with only 1 gb of ram.

The suggestions for a lightweight binary (no compiling) distro are good, unless you can upgrade hardware.