(This is a FAQ, as much as it's a question. See the archives of both debian-user and debian-devel about this.)
tripolar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 PROTECTED] http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/ "Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal." -- Abra Mitchell -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
