In home I use a computer with a quad-core AMD Phenom processor. Outside I use a laptop with a slow dual-core AMD Athlon 64 and only 2 GiB of RAM. Both are using Gentoo GNU/Linux. Since I update software on the laptop less often then once per week, it spends much time compiling it. Today I decided to use distcc for the Phenom-based computer to do some of this work instead of the laptop.
I used the official Gentoo Distcc Documentation to configure it. In my case it is simpler then described there. On the ‘slave’ computer I just installed distcc by emerge distcc, then changed the allowed IPs to my IPs in /etc/conf.d/distccd and started the service by /etc/init.d/distccd start (then rc-update add distccd default requested it to be started at each boot).
On the laptop I did the above and also edited the list of hosts used in /etc/distcc/hosts and two parameters for Portage integration in /etc/make.conf. Both required some experimentation to have load average on both computers below their number of cores. In the first one I finally specified only the IP of the Phenom-using machine. In the second one I added distcc to FEATURES and set MAKEOPTS to -j9 which was recommended by the documentation when using 4 cores.
top shows that this works. I should also change this configuration for packages which do not support distcc.
