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Re: A ? for all you old time linux users



On Sun, Oct 06, 2002 at 11:07:34AM -0400, Edward Guldemond wrote:
> It's feasible, and if you recompile from Debian sources, you can meet
> all of the dependencies.  There's only one problem though:  most
> packages are compiled with (reasonably) sane optimizations.  There won't
> be many performance gains.  If I had to recompile four parts of my
> system from source, they would be, in this order:
> 
> 1.  glibc, because it is THE library that all programs rely on
> 2.  gcc, because it might speed up compiles
> 3.  kernel, because a correctly tweaked kernel is a thing of beauty
> 4.  XFree86, because I had to include a fourth (X takes FOREVER to
>     build)
> 
> Even then I'm not sure that you'd get many performance gains.  Remember
> Knuth:  "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
> 
> This approach used to be valid back in the days of Slackware 2.0 (which
> I fondly remember but am happy in these days), but not because of speed
> increases usually, but usually because at the rate software was written,
> your distro inevitably never had the updated version of the packages you
> wanted, or never had this new software package.  Now, it's not so bad.
> I find Debian runs fine on my 486 DX2/66, my PII 400, and my P4 1.7 GhZ,
> and that's just at home.  Don't get me started on my SPARC at work! :-)

You have a sparc, and you didn't include openssl in your list of
software to recompile ? It must be a very fast sparc 

Frank

> Just my 2 red cents,
> 
> -- 
> ------------------------------------------
> Edward Guldemond
> 
> Key fingerprint:  29FF 2969 A04E F934 3F03  
>                   4329 BC56 3AA7 2F57 6735




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