Hi all: After i setup my laptop in dual boot mode for NTFS write access demo, i had pretty much exhausted the 5GB additional space (in '/' dir) criteria required for compiling large packages such as OpenOffice 2.3.1
i wasn't comfortable with gparted in relocating the partitions and so used gentoo linux livecd to setup the base system (ie. partitions, binutils, gcc, glibc, compiler toolchain and initramfs). The last 4 days were spent compiling the following packages with all gentoo specific patches applied. Here is the hardware specification Intel Celeron 2.4 GHz processor 1 GB SDRAM 20GB IDE Disk 1024x768 XGA with 24-bit color depth Intel HDA Here is information related to partition table and file system choice /boot 256 MB ext3 swap 2048 MB / rest reiserfs Yes, i setup ReiserFS for root partition as that speeds up small file access. I also used 'ccache' with 2GB cache size for compilations as in some cases one needs to back track and rebuild a package eg. poppler (PDF backend for GUI toolkits) once with QT3 and once with GTK+. The rebuild happens much faster. i'm also putting down the time taken for compilation, just in case anybody may want to try out this stuff themselves. setting up .config 23 min Linux kernel 2.6.23 48 min microEmacs 12 min vim 24 min xorg-x11 2 hr 16 min kde 3.5.7 full 38 hr + openoffice 2.3.1 9 hr 17 min kdevelop 3.5.0 2 hr 14 min mplayer + most of codecs 1 hr 38 min while the above numbers show approximate compilation time and package installs, separate additional time went in downloading about 2.4+ GB to packages from the repository. the entry for .config shows 23 minutes, as the Linux kernel compilation is completely dependent on .config settings. You can get in all processor specific enhancements and optimizations. One area where it did make a lot of difference was sound support (CONFIG_SOUND should be set but other sound options should not be set). ALSA driver support built into the kernel rocks. The other reason why this took so much time, is because i also spent some time trying to read about the explanation of the various features for devices and file systems. Reading them you come to know stuff that doesn't showup in lectures or text books. 'mplayer' can give very good performance if you compile it with MMX, SSE, SSE2 register support.Custom compilation gives you that power. Something that general distro RPMs, DEBs can't match upto. Why go through all this pain some may ask ? Well, the performance of the software products like OpenOffice or InkScape or KDevelop is *so much* better. Overall the system is very responsive and multimedia experience playing MPEG4, DivX is amazing. Anybody wanting to give it a try, i'll surely be able to lend a helping hand. Have a fantastic year 2008 ahead ! -- thanks Saifi.
