need advice on ebuilds

[Ylanday69]

hi all, well i was just looking at the gentoo install disk and decided to take a peek inside the portage snapshot (20040413) and was surprised to see a whole lot of ebuilds, and i read earlier on this forum about installing precompiled packages with an emerge -k command if the packages r in /usr/portage/packages/all ....... i was wondering if these ebuilds from the portage snapshot r the same thing. Can i just place the folder for a few paks i want into the above directory and then type in the console emerge -k packagename ??? The reason im interested in this is becos most things on my system take ages to compile and the cpu becomes overloaded and i cant even move the mouse, i know its better to compile from source but i thought this may be a better way just for a few things.
thx in advance for any help that may be offered

[winterborne]

Sorry to say, the portage snapshot isn't precompiled. In fact, it's not even the source; it only contains instructions for 'emerge' to download and install each package.

If every package in portage was compiled and then put in a tar, the immensity of that tar file would actually create a black hole.

[nobspangle]

If you want precompiled packages, download the gentoo install CD2 for pentium3 from the gentoo site and follow the instructions in the manual.