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Re: What does i386 exactly mean?



On Mon, 2005-01-31 at 16:03 +0100, Nicos Gollan wrote:
> On Monday January 31 2005 15:21, andras.lorincz@gmail.com wrote:
[snip]
> For most packages, it really doesn't matter. It doesn't make much sense to 
> have a shell or about any other interactive program use MMX and SSE 
> extensions since those programs spend 99.9% of their time waiting for user 
> input.
> 
> There are some rare cases where a customized build will offer an advantage, 
> all of them CPU intensive programs like raytracers, graphics applications, 
> A/V codecs and games. Usually simply building a package from the debian 
> sources will apply the correct processor-specific extensions, but it doesn't 
> hurt to look through the debian/rules file before a build.

And, often, these types of programs have built-in CPU optimization,
or there are CPU-specific packages.
$ apt-cache search atlas3 | cut -d\  -f1 | sort
atlas3-3dnow
atlas3-3dnow-dev
atlas3-base
atlas3-base-dev
atlas3-doc
atlas3-headers
atlas3-sse
atlas3-sse2
atlas3-sse2-dev
atlas3-sse-dev
atlas3-test

$ apt-cache search mplayer | grep ^mplay | sort
mplayer-386 - The Ultimate Movie Player For Linux
mplayer-586 - The Ultimate Movie Player For Linux
mplayer-686 - transitional dummy package which can be safely removed
mplayer-doc - Documentation for mplayer
mplayer-fonts - Fonts for mplayer
mplayer-k6 - The Ultimate Movie Player For Linux
mplayer-k7 - transitional dummy package which can be safely removed
mplayer-nogui - The Ultimate Movie Player For Linux

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Ron Johnson, Jr.
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If 1/2 of all US marriages end in divorce, and there are a good
number of 3rd, 4th, etc marriages, then more than 1/2 of all 1st
marriages will be permanent.

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