Seperate compile from the rest of the installation proces
 

I use an old P-133 Fujitsu Laptop at home and sometimes at work and I recently figured out a way to use my computer resources more wisely: 'move' the compile process to my server with powerful hardware performance and drop the binaries back to my client machine, which I thought it's a common idea to be implemented.

But what should I do practically when compiling source code? I'd like to learn more about these things... you know using a P-133 machine with 96MB Ram and 1xx MB of free HDD space is not viable at all..

Any advise / info is appreciated.

I am not a programmer nor a compiling expert, but I think what you want to do is called cross-compiling. Searching this keyword in google I found this:

http://www.jimbrooks.org/web/linux/d...inuxKernel.php

I guess you could also apply this to 'normal' software.

this can get a little tricky
if it's an intel platform i don't think it's cross compiling
just don't use compiler architecture flags above the older computers architecture (arch=i586) ?
then just try it
if core lib gcc versions are way different you might have to build some older or newer gcc libs on the target for compatability (or just copy them from the server) i've just copied libs before and they work even though you think they wouldn't because they were compiled on a different glibc version.
basically just run them from the command line on the host and see if they complain about missing stuff and if they do then go from there to make them happy.

Have a look at distcc (http://distcc.samba.org/); it's a front end to gcc that allows for distributed compilation.

Your laptop and server can work cooperatively to compile source.

Lyle

Great, I shall have a look.

BTW I did a bit of embedded system stuff and I suppose cross compling is basically to use platform A machine to compile stuff for machine B.
E.g. an i686 machine compiling stuff for powerpc... then you need to pass some flags to the compiler when compiling.