installing debian though compiling most everything.....

[tripolar]

I recently tinkered with another GNU/Linux distro Gentoo. I was
impressed with several features- especially having everything run super
fast compared to other distros.
I am sure there is a simple answer to this though I must ask to get it :-)
I would like to go back to debian though start with a very small base
then any other programs I install- compile them from source to get a
more stripped and fast OS.
I seem to remember some line in sources.list relateding to source.
Any suggestions what to start with?

Also, Do most of you consider Debian better than Gentoo? Why?

Thanks


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[Shaul Karl]

On Fri, Aug 01, 2003 at 02:16:22AM -0500, tripolar wrote:

> I recently tinkered with another GNU/Linux distro Gentoo. I was
> impressed with several features- especially having everything run super
> fast compared to other distros.

I am curious about the hardware that Gentoo ran faster and the way the
slower distros were made.

> I am sure there is a simple answer to this though I must ask to get it :-)
> I would like to go back to debian though start with a very small base
> then any other programs I install- compile them from source to get a
> more stripped and fast OS.
> I seem to remember some line in sources.list relateding to source.
> Any suggestions what to start with?
>

One should probably begin with the packages listed as
build-essential.

In case the discussion here will be short I would try to raise it on
debian-devel. I also believe that one should define the frame work
first. In order to make this discussion targets a large audience and
also probably to make things simpler I would assume that the frame work
is that there is no option to cross compile. There fore, a minimal
binary Debian system to begin with is unavoidable.

> Also, Do most of you consider Debian better than Gentoo? Why?
>

Never tried Gentoo.
--

Shaul Karl, shaul @ actcom . net .il


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[David Z Maze]

(This is a FAQ, as much as it's a question. See the archives of both
debian-user and debian-devel about this.)

tripolar <tripolar@comcast.net> writes:

> I recently tinkered with another GNU/Linux distro Gentoo. I was
> impressed with several features- especially having everything run
> super fast compared to other distros.

Really? The canonical request here is for numbers substantiating this
claim; with very limited exceptions, processor-specific optimizations
seem to add very little to most programs, which tend to be speed-bound
by the disk subsystem or the user.

> I am sure there is a simple answer to this though I must ask to get
> it :-) I would like to go back to debian though start with a very
> small base then any other programs I install- compile them from
> source to get a more stripped and fast OS.

Debian has poor support for doing this sort of thing. Individual
packages can be easily rebuilt (look at 'debuild' in the devscripts
package, for example) but it's non-trivial to force gcc to run with a
particular set of options.

> I seem to remember some line in sources.list relateding to source.
> Any suggestions what to start with?

In general, copy all of your 'deb' lines and change the first word to
'deb-src'. 'apt-get source packagename' will get the source. You can
also download sources directly from the FTP site; 'dpkg-source -x
foo.dsc' will unpack a Debian source package, given the .orig.tar.gz
and .diff.gz as well.

If you really do want to do this, you'll probably need to write the
machinery to do semi-automated recompilation on your own, and remember
to recompile packages when they've updated on the Debian site. If you
really do want to compile everything on your system from source,
Gentoo might be a better choice for explicitly catering to you.

> Also, Do most of you consider Debian better than Gentoo? Why?

Disclaimer: I've never used Gentoo. I'm actually much happier with
Debian over Slackware in that it *doesn't* force me to recompile any
time I want to change something; in tracking unstable, I only need to
pay the time cost of downloading packages, not the further cost of
compiling them. And when we do have the occasional package that
requires more processor-specific tuning (ssh and atlas come to mind),
Debian tries to accomodate that.

--
David Maze [email]dmaze@debian.org[/email] [url]http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/[/url]
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell


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[Andreas Fromm]

tripolar wrote:

> I recently tinkered with another GNU/Linux distro Gentoo. I was
> impressed with several features- especially having everything run
> super fast compared to other distros.
> I am sure there is a simple answer to this though I must ask to get it
> :-)
> I would like to go back to debian though start with a very small base
> then any other programs I install- compile them from source to get a
> more stripped and fast OS.
> I seem to remember some line in sources.list relateding to source.
> Any suggestions what to start with?
>
> Also, Do most of you consider Debian better than Gentoo? Why?
>
> Thanks
>
>

I played around a bit with this idea and found out that the only thing
where I could notice a difference was compilen a custom kernel with the
new gcc-3.? and setting the optimization level for my CPU correctly in
the Kernel makfile.

/usr/src/linux/arch/i386/Makefile

ifdef CONFIG_MPENTIUMIII
CFLAGS += -march=pentium3 -mmmx -msse
endif

I'm not sure if the -mmx -msse will make any difference because they can
only be used for floating point arithmetic, and thats something the
kernel doesn't do much.

I also set the optimisation level form -O2 to -O3 in some earlier
compilations, but I can't say It made a difference I could notice,
beside of increasing the size of the binary so that I couldn't make a
rescue-floppy anymore (which I usually don't do anyway).

The other application where I noticed a real difference was with
mplayer, which I compiled from source with different optimisations and
got big performnce differences when reproducing dvds.


About the Debian or Gentoo question: I liked the idea of gentoo, but
found it a bit unpracticable to have to wait all the compilation when
installing a little app I just want to try. The other aspect is that
Debian is seemlessly integrated comparing with gentoo. (I don't want to
start a flame here, it's just my opinion) And you have a lot more
ready-packaged applications which makes life easier. Thats the main
reason I kept Debian as my OS.

You can also try apt-build, but as I said, compiling the a nice kernel
for my cpu was the only thing worth doing in my opinion.

Regards, and sorry for my english

Andreas



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