Ubuntu i686 idea

[Molot]

Umkay... I don't know where exactly post it, so sorry if it don't belong here...

Me and my friends like Ubuntu. But, comparing to Arch or Gentoo, Ubuntu is sloooow on our machines. As far as we know, it's because all packages are compiled for an i386 architecture. So we want to recompile all base packages (possibly all packages, if we will get support in calculating power).

To do it fast, we will be using Arch linux. It is based on it's own package type (a bit Slack-like), so we don't have any automats to simply manage deb packages for Ubuntu.

So, if anyone has experience in recompiling deb from source packages to binary packages on Arch (eventually Slack or sth like this...), it would be great help for us.

[DJ_Max]

Thats one of the consequences of using a pre-compiled binary Linux distro, you don't get to compile the software to your specific system. There's a program that does something similar called alien, but wouldn't depend on it. Recompiling .deb from the source, to Arch would be tricky & risky.

[HungSquirrel]

But, comparing to Arch or Gentoo, Ubuntu is sloooow on our machines. As far as we know, it's because all packages are compiled for an i386 architecture.

You can significantly improve the speed of any distro by prelinking.

[muzzy]

Thats one of the consequences of using a pre-compiled binary Linux distro, you don't get to compile the software to your specific system. There's a program that does something similar called alien, but wouldn't depend on it. Recompiling .deb from the source, to Arch would be tricky & risky.

DJ_Max, you don't understood something. We don't want to add ubuntu packages to arch. We would like to compile whole ubuntu for i686, but using machines with arch installed.
So we ask if there anybody experienced in compiling debian/ubuntu packages on diffrent distributions. Maybe some advices or sth?
And one more thing. Does anybody have scrripts or sth that were used to compile ubuntu?

[pip]

Ubuntu pakages are already optimized for pentium 4.
See this thread: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=13753

[muzzy]

Ubuntu pakages are already optimized for pentium 4.
See this thread: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=13753

It's optimized for i486, but it can use pentium4. I don't have such processor and I will never buy it. I'm using AMD, so it will use only 486 instructions. We (me and molot) would like to compile it with march=i686

[Molot]

As Muzzy said, many people don't use pentium4. I'm using athlon cpu, so i486 instruction set and optimizations for pentium may result in slow work. Much, much slower than i686 instruction set {Added: Ok, with proc-specific optimizations...} (measured - even 10% on some tasks, usually 2-5% what make difference when compiling large parts of code et cetera). Aslo, as pentium is the default target cpu, we may recompile Ubuntu with athlon/duron as a target. Added: All cpu'owners shoul have their chance to get perfect OS, don't they?

I don't know is there any difference for pentium between current ubuntu compilation options and i686 without cpu-specific optimizations... And I don't care, to be honest.

Added:
We have enought computing power to do that, so why not?
Aslo, we don't want to force i686 to be a mainstream standard...

[Leif]

To be honest with you, I'm perfectly happy with the performance of both my ubuntu machines, and I doubt that I would really feel it if I were running k7/686smp optimized everything. But I would guess that quite a few people would be interested, so would it be possible to get a community effort, using smt like distcc, to generate a variety of builds ? Or would packages built this way not be trustworthy ?

[dusu]

To be honest with you, I'm perfectly happy with the performance of both my ubuntu machines, and I doubt that I would really feel it if I were running k7/686smp optimized everything. But I would guess that quite a few people would be interested, so would it be possible to get a community effort, using smt like distcc, to generate a variety of builds ? Or would packages built this way not be trustworthy ?

I think I have to diagree with you Leif.
I now use a 686 kernel, and can feel the difference with the default 386 one, on my pretty old laptop. So I guess (though I'm not sure) that using i686 compiled programs should make some difference.

[Astrophobos]

How about apt-build ?

apt-cache show apt-build

Package: apt-build
Priority: optional
Section: universe/devel
Installed-Size: 160
Maintainer: Julien Danjou <acid@debian.org>
Architecture: all
Version: 0.9.16
Depends: perl, apt (>= 0.5), gcc, g++, dpkg-dev (>= 1.9), libappconfig-perl (>= 1.5), libapt-pkg-perl (>= 0.1.11), debconf, devscripts, apt-utils
Recommends: fakeroot, build-essential
Conflicts: pentium-builder
Filename: pool/universe/a/apt-build/apt-build_0.9.16_all.deb
Size: 26852
MD5sum: a174ac8badb48c9844c34502a907d014
Description: Frontend to apt to build, optimize and install packages
 This is an apt-get front-end for compiling software optimized
 for your architecture by creating a local repository with built packages.
 It can manage system upgrade too.
Bugs: mailto:ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com
Origin: Ubuntu