You guys are doing some interesting things, dual booting with vanilla Slackware sounds great for trashing and experimenting all you want and learn!
I hope not to be out of place here to recomend this link to the original poster, it has some nice tutorials, anyway i guess everybody has seen it already.
http://www.linuxpackages.net/howto.php

Live system here. I just got XFree86 4.5.99.903 built and I'm building gtk+-2.8.17 now. I'm also working on getting enlightenment DR17 built and I'm building Mesa 6.5 (which is out now) in support of that.

Peace...

Yep.

I tend to upgrade to newer versions of older packages when I rebuild stuff. I don't always rebuild absolutely everything.

Peace...

Yea, I use updated sorce too but abandonware like avifile, you have no choice. If you use unmaintained software with the latest GCC, Fedora CVS is the best place to go for patches.

In regards to the OP, I don't see much of a benefit in recompiling Slackware verbatim as Pat does unless your going to get a little crazy with it. Just changing -march to i686 isn't really going to do anything for you. It's the -mtune where you'll gain noticeable speed increase, if any, and Slackware is allready 'mtuned' for i686 machines.

Still, might be an interesting expierence for you if your a little bored and/or want to learn more about how Pat builds Slackware.

Gotcha. "abandonware",

Now that you mention it, I guess one performance benefit I do get from rebuilding from source is software "optimized" for i686, since I'm starting from Slackware 8, which isn't (as far as I know).

I need to get a new machine.

Peace...

I'm trying a similar thing with FC4, I've done a minimal install and then used yum to update only the software I want. Probably not as good as compiling from source but it's start to customise a distro.

I just built my own kernel, but I'll continue to complete a full distro.

Thanks for your ideas.

Heres a very long thread from a while back when Grapefruitgirl decided to build a Slackware From Scratch system. It may be of interest:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-begin-558415/

I think the easiest way will be installing "normal" Slackware, then building custom versions of all packages (by using source and modifying slackbuilds), and then replacing installed packages with ones you've built (using upgradepkg or removepkg/installpkg).

You know, I still wonder what happened to that. Last I remember her machine blew up. Or something.

Yeah - she still posts occasionally - don't know what happened to the project though. I was following at the time as I'd done a LFS some time before. I may even do it again sometime but other projects are waiting in line and first time around it took a long time !

I started out rebuilding Slackware 10.2 for 32-bit AMD Athlon with "-march=athlon -falign-functions=4 -falign-jumps=4 -falign-loops=4". Most of it went pretty well except for KDE, which didn't like those optimisations very much, and GNOME, which still had some very broken DESTDIR functionality at the time. That was a nice experiment but the most important thing I took away from it was getting experience on rebuilding the stable Slackware distribution using LFS guidelines without ending up without a package manager. The other thing was fixing the (older) build scripts to accommodate for other build flags than the fixed ones, e.g. "-march=i386 -mcpu=i686" and "-march=i486 -mtune=i686", they came with.

I had always thought of the idea of porting the distribution to another architecture. So even though I didn't end up using the AMD Athlon optimised packages for more than my own machine, the build scripts I fixed while building on i386 made the experience of porting to little-endian MIPS and SPARC a lot easier, since I had already done most of the work before. So here I am, mostly running on non-x86 architectures nowadays. I just got myself an SGI Origin 2000 yesterday, so that's what I'm going to work on next and you'll probably know how that's going to end up .