Mageia forum

I was talking to someone years ago who was coding said program just wondered how it was going?

Sorry dwhite, can not imagine what exactly your question is right here.

Oh yeah, I remember. Wasn't that guy way back then, coding that program doing that...thing?
I'm curious myself because I have exactly that type of hardware.

Nah, that was the other thing that this guy was doing.

dwhite wrote:I was talking to someone years ago who was coding said program just wondered how it was going?

Was it a Gentoo developer?

Seriously, it's impossible. The kernel still needs the drivers. If they don't exist, it won't work on your hardware. I do remember reading a few years back about a project that would allow Windows drivers to work in Linux. I guess they either never figured it out, or it just lost steam and withered?

You're talking about the Cody Brocious's Alky project?

dubigrasu wrote:You're talking about the Cody Brocious's Alky project?

Which has been discontinued since 2006. That was just for DirectX on alternative OS's and older Windows installations.

I don't remember, I was talking to a coder who rather like BSD people but for different reasons thought that all software would run better if it on installation it was compiled for the exact hardware by a utility. He was saying he'd just re-compiled from source his Linux installation, He said that large performance gains happened. And was making a software package that did that. He, I don't remember his name lived in British Columbia, I think.

You are talking about the Gentoo distribution (among others).

You would think but no we both had Gentoo, but what he proposed was much more user-friendly. More like the ease of at that time a Mandrake install.

dwhite wrote:You would think but no we both had Gentoo, but what he proposed was much more user-friendly. More like the ease of at that time a Mandrake install.

What he proposed or what he used?
The Linux world is full of proposals and almost every system can be improved somehow. But reality shows that there have to be people who actually give life to those proposals.

Just do the simple math: Let's say, recompiling a complete, typical desktop installation on an older machine,
where it would have a noticeable effect later on, would take like, say 50 hours. And it would save you say
5 minutes per day from program runtime, it would take more than 18 months 24/7 runtime to reach a break-even
point for the time needed to install/compile.

Where 18 months is the typical lifetime of a desktop distro. Then you need to reinstall.
Overall there's no gain for typical desktop/office usage, IMHO. Feel free to prove me wrong.

I'm not saying that some special applications might not greatly benefit from compiler optimizations,
but for the average use case, there's too much cost for virtually no gain.

I dare you to take that to Gentoo's forums.
They'll shred you to pieces

Nope, because Gentoo is not the typical desktop distro, and actually it's a builtin feature, no maybe to say it better the cornerstone of Gentoo,
or other source-based distributions like Source Mage, Crux, GoboLinux or Linux from Scratch. If you like that, why not.

Maybe you also want to take a look at http://www.greenfly.org/mes.html

There was also a PDF quite some time ago, at http://cybercfo.gkmweb.com/mandrake_a_la_gentoo-9.2.pdf
but unfortunately it's gone.

dwhite wrote:You would think but no we both had Gentoo, but what he proposed was much more user-friendly. More like the ease of at that time a Mandrake install.

Try looking at Sabayon. It's Gentoo, only with a ready to go installation from the get-go.

What's the spec that Mageia 1 is written on? There must be some lucky stiff somewhere that just happens to have the exact spec that Mageia was written on. I bet that no one else has exactly the same chip as me the same M'board by compiling software for each machine we are told that the program would run slightly more stable under high load not a lot better but slightly better. I trained as a Network Engineer if I was building a server I'd probably want to compile, but on a user machine never, but with a utility to do it hmmmm I don't know? just install the prog run it in the background leave the machine working and on, I think 50 hours is much too high 12 hours for 18 months of nearly trouble free operation It's a quandary.

dwhite wrote:I think 50 hours is much too high 12 hours for 18 months of nearly trouble free operation It's a quandary.

If you think so ... have you ever tried to compile - say libreoffice? Do you know how long it takes and how much diskspace is used?
Can't estimate the time cause i don't know what CPU you have, just to give you a relation, back in openoffice 2.x days
a full build took nearly 24 hours on a 2GHz P4 1GB RAM desktop machine. To give you another hint, it has never decreased since.
And diskspace needed for libreoffice build would be 50-60GB, that is if you would rebuild the source packages, which would be the only
viable solution for what you want to achieve on a package-based distro. That would be for one source package, do the maths for
a typical desktop installation.

Also saying that compiler optimizations will give you more stable operation, that's not the case,
in most cases adding compiler optimizations raises the chances that your programs will segfault or produce other bugs.

But what do i know, i'm just a dumb packager ... sigh

I liked the Gentoo concept and tried it out. I just wanted to make a superduper fast Gnome installation. I cannot remember if the compilation of Gnome took 3 hours or if I gave up after three hours. You learn a lot, but you really need to be patient.