LFS questions
 

No tech questions yet just curious on opinons..

Is there a point is optimising compiles?
I read here that you don't notice any difference..My computer will be the only one using it and I just did a cpu swap so won't be changing it for while now..Well has anyone noticed any particular programs that do perform better when optimised.

and..
I'm curious what window manager I should go for..now I'm sure you'll all say each to their own..I read window maker is good general purpose..
This lfs install is gonna be used for thrashing/testing/games (gotta be honest).. Cause I'm real curious about linux but was always too scared to play with mine..so I'm hoping I can play with this until it doesn't work without losing anything apart from time (not that it works yet anyway)..
I have yet to really see other people using linux for games but I love them and was very impressed with wolfenstien..it ran much better than my win version so rather than go with what I know I'd rather see what differences faster desktop env would make..
ummm..yea.. thats it..

Opinons? words of warning/wisdom?

annnnnd...

Unless I'm going senile at an early age I remember reading that you can use multiple desktop env's (why do I still call it that *shakes fist at windows*..what I mean is window managers)..if so anyone know I link with practical information about it ie. how one would go about it.

Well if you have a pretty recent machine you probably won't notice much especially since in the beginning the system is so minimal it seems so much faster then any distribution you've ever installed. I build my lfs system on a 350mhz machine so I optimized most packages to try and get the most speed out of it. I don't think I've noticed massive speed improvement but I do believe it makes a slight difference, especially if you add up the speed difference of all the packages. You might want to read the optimization hint though: http://hints.linuxfromscratch.org/hi...timization.txt

For a desktop environment you should really try out several of them and see which one suits you best. I'm sure you already read the "Which GUI do you use" thread in this forum which should give you some more pointers on peoples opinions.
I don't think referring to them as desktop environments is wrong since most of them include a lot more then just the window manager itself. But I'm probably terribly wrong on that.

Again, what Mik said is really right... if this is an Athlon 1800, the difference between .254 seconds and .250 seconds is kinda minimal.

I did mine on a P1 200, so optimizing for pentium I think may have sped things up quite a bit without all of the needless 386sx support for certain processes in there.

Cheers,

Finegan

how to switch between window managers...
 

There are, as always, a few ways of doing it. Personally I do it by editing the .xinitrc file. Mine looks like this:

case "$1" in
kde)
exec /usr/kde/bin/startkde
;;
gnome)
exec /usr/gnome/bin/gnome-session
;;
blackbox)
exec /usr/bin/blackbox
xterm)
exec /usr/X11R6/bin/xterm
enlightenment)
exec /usr/bin/englightenment
;;
*)
$0 blackbox
esac


Now, you can pick which window manager you want to start by running "startx blah" where blah is one of kde, gnome, blackbox, xterm, englightenment

If you don't provide anything, the *) clause will kick in and blackbox is specified as default.

a lot of the compile-time optimizations can only really be seen in comparison - if you have a lfs box sitting next to an ez-install-distro box with identical processers, specs, ect, you'll see a definite difference in boot time, execute, performance, ect. it's not so easy to notice the difference when you just upgrade one prog at a time like patchwork.

I'm thinking that optimising will have to wait util I've got more experience to be able to recognise the issues that it could cause or else I'd see myself in an endless loop..

So in your xinitrc file did you just replace the start window manager line with that case statement?

Up to page 84 now...no other isssues yet..but I realise that some source dirs you do need to remove after you first use them cause second time around just re-extracting them doesn't seem to put it back the way it was..

you don't want to rebuild with those old source folders.


and Dude !

twm rocks

:D