[olug] Compiling for your PC

[Eric Penne]

I've been using APT now and I love it.  Recently a thread on a Debian
email list was discussing getting rid of i386 and compiling for i486
instead.  Some computation intensive tasks in OpenSSL showed a minimum 4%
improvement in speed with one having a 100+% improvement.  Obviously there
will be performance improvements to most packages but is it worth the
comile time?  Is it possible to use APT to download the source, compile,
then install all in one step?  I know people like Gentoo but I don't want
to jump head first into fast flowing currents. :)  I just want to dip my
toes in.

In other news, upgrading from 128MB to 256MB on a Celeron 800MHz cut the
load time of OpenOffice 1.0.3 from 2 minutes to 30 seconds.  I'm wondering
if compiling from source would cut that time down even more.

Eric Penne