This compiling thing is not something that I'm overly familiar with, usually grab the RPM somewhere which typically does the trick.

If am am however compiling in my case mysql4.1 on one machine (celeron) and I then were to grab the RPM's it creates and put em on a different machine (p4) would I be able to install this?

I assume so otherwise how do all these RPM's work but are there any type of rules or caveats that I should be aware of when compiling on machine x and then installing on machine Y.

Between 32 bit PC HW off course.

Thx

If you are building an rpm, i386, 586 and i686 rpms work on most modern x86 type CPUs. I usually build my rpms as i386 and they work fine on my Athlon machines.

If you are compiling on a system and then installing the rpm on a system with same architecture, then it wud work fine. Even if you are installing on a different architecture machine, it 'll work in most of the cases but if the package fails in some dependency checks ( say it doesnt ind a library file, but the file is actually in some other location) then it cud fail.