Re: need advice on building packages from source
On Tue, Sep 17, 2002 at 03:40:10PM -0600, Cameron Matheson wrote:
> I played around w/ gentoo a few months ago (and promptly came back to
> debian (i missed apt) ). But i do miss the optimization i experienced
> w/ gentoo (despite what everyone says, there was a very noticeable
> difference in performance on my machine between debian and gentoo), so i
Sorry for questioning you're perception of speed increase. I have
played with Gentoo as well. I liked it very much. Mostly because of
the stability of the desktop. Don't know how or why, but X +
Windowmaker sometimes hangs on my machine in a way that makes a BSOD
pretty. I think it's a lockup somewhere on a very low level, because
killing a bunch of stuff from a shell prompt (logged in from another
machine) won't give me back a prompt.
Anyway a Gentoo installation is nowhere near as full featured as the
cleanest and smallest Debian installation. A lot of things just
don't work "out of the box". Is it at all possible that this is why
Gentoo feels faster?
One other thing I noticed is that Gentoo brought up my disks in UDMA
100 mode, Debian did not. Ofcourse I went in to change this in
Debian. Et voila, a speed increase that I never thought of getting
before.
> I dont' really want to build everything from source (that takes way too
> long on my k6-2), but i was thinking maybe compiling glibc, moz,
> (g|bz)ip, etc might be a good thing... what would be the best way to go
> about this?
I really had to compile a package with optimization for my
situation. There were some threads on this and the debian-sparc
lists. It had to do with libssl. That was easily the most difficult
thing I have done on a Debian system. I used the source package,
and followed instructions found in the usual places, but had to
search a long time for the place to change some compiler flags.
I believe that there are some packages that assist in this, but it
is all very non-intuitive. I got a confirmation of this, after
reading some messages (DWN or -devel list, I think) that discussed
this. I believe something is in the works for a future release that
makes optimization a lot easier.
I have never been much of a performance tweaker (hardware or
software). The libssl deb was really necassary for me; ssh-login now
takes three seconds in stead of 12 or more (arch related btw).
So unless you can be more specific on what to optimize, it's perhaps
best to find out what other things make Gentoo faster instead
of recompiling packages that might or might not make the base-system
faster.
Good luck if you despite my rambling would still like to go on.
Bob
Reply to: