Speed and Compiling.

[Duane Attaway]

Compiling is fun.  But you can still have a fast box without that
adventure.  Hacking runlevel configurations are easier and quicker;  
however, you can almost get into trouble on par with DLL hell, but its
quicker to dig yourself out...

What I do is try the minimalistic approach.  Starting at runlevel 1, I
start services that I only really need.  Most distributions start
everything including the coffee maker and kitchen sink.  This fills up the
memory and makes for a busy system.  A quiet cpu is a happy cpu.

On my redhat 7.2 system, /etc/rc.d/rc5.d is a busy mess of services run by
default.  All those files starting with an "S" are started by default in
numerical order.  Since I don't need all that on a daily basis, I renamed
the S(start) files into K(kill) files.  With X running, only 64MB of 256MB
is being used!  This makes my system very fast.

The only services I run are network, syslog, httpd, nscd, pcmcia, random,
apmd, sendmail, sshd, ntpd, junkbuster, xfs, and local.  Sometimes I will
start a service, say if I want to use the printer.

Keeping X minimalistic is another adventure.  I like things simple.  A car
without the fancy stuff, just the motor and wheels is a high performance
car.  Same with X.  I threw out all the gnome initialization stuff and 
started only Enlightenment.  E without the gnome has enough do-dads for me 
and still lightweight enough to move windows around.  It works for me.  
So, in my ~/.Xclients file is:

exec /usr/bin/enlightenment

While it only loads enlightenment when my 'pooter starts, gnome apps can
still run because I haven't removed those libraries or anything.  I'm just
running the basic window manager.  And its quick as the day Rasterman
unleashed the first versions many moons ago.

Window managers often do consume resources.  Depending on the window
manager and how it was started, you can kill it and start another.  
Watching the borders disappear and return to the pure glory of X is a
remarkable sight.  

ooops... it appears enlightenment does not like to be killed when run
under xdm. A person can spend many years perfecting configurations.

On Fri, 1 Mar 2002, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:

> So Lucas is needing to pep up his DVD playback, and I'm grumbling that
> everything I try to do in KDE is so slow I end up rebooting the same box
> back to W95 if I want to get any work done (Gnome is not quite usable on my
> system yet, that's my current struggle).
> 
> And Duane is talking about how, with a clean install and some selective
> custom complies, he's very pleased with his performance.
> 
> So how about some advice and help for non-programmers/developers on doing
> the custom compiles?  Maybe we should have a "Compile Fest" instead of an
> Install Fest some time.
> 
> For one thing, I would love to see a list of exactly what packages you need
> to install, given a workstation with NO source or Development tools
> (unselect any "devel" package or anything labeled "development in an RPM
> based install).  How about a simple "you must have these packages" list for
> a kernel compile?
> 
> Every time I've tried to install something that required a compile, I've
> ended up in dependency hell far worse than I've ever seen DLL hell.  I
> actually trashed one box because I accidentally got some Mandrake packages
> on a RedHat box (gee, thanks Mr. rpmfind!), and I have never resolved all of
> the required libraries in order to complete a simple compilation.
> 
> So how about it, oh wise ones?