Hi everybody,

I have a quite outdated computer, an athlon 1.1ghz. I was wondering whether recompiling the full Slackware using the platform's specific flags would speed up a the way my computer works.

Any of you tried this before? Did it worh it? Is there a __simple__ way to do it, or every package has to be built manually?

I use KDE for my daily work. And with every new release KDE just gets bigger and slower. I am curious whether is or not a comparable difference between the generic builds which comes with the distribution and the platform specific builds. The same question goes for Mozilla.

Thank you,
Tintapok

pat says that the -march=i486 -mcpu=i686 that slackware uses have the same result with -march=i686.
I don't think you'll get a great improve on this. In most cases the improve is in applications like mplayer that use a lot of floating point operations.

I guess you should rather look for a lightweighted window manager and more RAM, I have quite the same specs (Athlon 1.3 GHz, 512 MB of RAM). If you use fluxbox, blackbox or xfce you can gain much speed.
I would never build all by myself -- do you have any idea how long this would take on your machine? In my humble opinion the few extra seconds you could probably get can't be enough to do this time-consuming work.

Or as upgrades come out use the Slackbuild. It knocked about a second or two off KDE's load time (i timed it multiple times).

A 1.1 Ghz system sounds relatively decent for Slackware, and I don't see any reason to rebuild Slackware, unless you are a Gentoo user, and are that obssessed. I myself am running on an even more outdated system, and I have to upgrade, but it serves me just fine. I am running an AMDK-62 450MHz, 19GB hard drive, dual boot with win2kpro, ATI Radeon 7500 64MB, and 448MB of ram. I even run KDE, with all of the transistions and fancy animations turned off, granted it still takes maybe up to 20 or so seconds to load, but everything still works relatively decently for my system, and I am happy.

On my sisters PC (Duron 850, 256 RAM, Vipper 550) slack 10 runs fine with KDE

*EDIT*
I've just noticed it, this is your first Post.
WELCOME to LQ forums

Hmm,... Athlon 1.1 outdated? I'd think you'd be better suited to finding KDE tweaks (there are literally hundreds!) than recompiling everything.

As a side note, fluxbox loads in Slackware in less than 3 seconds on this same computer! If you want fast, Slackware and fluxbox are gold!

I'm running slackware-current with freerock gnome installed.
I use KDE 90 percent of the time.

AMD athalon 1200
512 MB ram

No speed issues at all.

I had a Duron 700 in it before and it worked great as well - the 1200 is better of course.

I don't run games or edit video, but I do alot of digital photo stuff.
I also run other distros on the same box and slack is the "peppiest".
Debian is #2
Ubuntu is a distant 3rd .


All subjective of course.

Perhaps you have some processes misbehaving in the background sucking up CPU?

why don't you try FreeBSD?

Do a minimum install. You can compile your kernel, for your own proc type (actually, 386,586 or 686).
If you have broadband, you can compile all ports too.

I had FVWM2 on FreeBSD on a P 200. It was quite decent. Of course, I never did OOo or Video playing, but it was used extensively for playing MP3s.

good luck!!

The fact is that I'm just used with the Slackware & KDE combination, and have no appetite to figure out the ins and outs of another distro. Maybe I give it a try to Gentoo, which advertises himself as the os >>from source<<.

I can't say not to try Gentoo, but really you have to consider one thing, if you are trying it, do you really want to wait around all the time for a program to finish compiling before running it? To me it just seems like a waste. And if you wanted from source, I am sure that LFS(Linux From Scratch) might be a better choice, but in my opinion, I would rather have a working distro the minute I install it, and not have to wait hours for it to compile itself

Well, I've tried LFS4,5,6 and neither worked with my Slackware10.1 sources
So now I decided to recompile Slack.
First, I tried this scheme (offered by another man who wanted the same): install Slack, then recompile some programs day by day... and in the end you'll get recompiled Slack.
Well, I've tried to recompile "atk". "./configure" was successful, but make wasn't. This means that "base apps" are not easy to recompile.
Although I've just made a minimal install of Slack on another partition (2GB) and will try to compile, firstly, all stuff from "l" dir (except Glibc).
But since I'm sure there will be errors during "make", I'll be asking for help here.
So it's gonna take up to a month to recompile whole Slack when one doesn't know all the dependencies...

I want to try it... Hope you'll help me, guys

I like XFce.. (yes guys, here i go again...)

it's got the beauty of KDE, but without the bloat. I switched into it after using KDE for years on end, but i still use kde's konqueror file manager. You can still use any and most of all KDE apps in XFce btw.

I tried XFCE, it looks nice, but I am back with KDE, mainly because I can't get my side buttons and wheel to work in XFCE, since the xinitrc file is different, and I don't know if I can simply add this to the XFCE version of xinitrc..
And also, I have tried looking everywhere in the XFCE options so I can change the resolution to 1024x768@100Hz but couldn't, and so I was stuck with an 800x600 screen that obviously was not centered.

Also, one note, recompiling Slack that way may sound like an interesting project, but it seems to me by the time you finish, months may have gone by, and so I don't see the practicality of that. I am sure there must be a faster way to rebuild Slack if thats really what you want, but I really don't know, and just don't see any real advantage to that.

Yep, I've just tried to build X... oh, I'm at a loss... I think I was to loud to say "I will try"...
I had to say "well, may be I'll try"...