[KLUG Members] Gentoo Linux questions

[Adam Williams]

>In an email posted earlier in the week, It sounded
>like the Gentoo distribution compiles a kernel and
>possibly all of the linux apps/programs you install
>with it.  

Thats pretty impressive, I've never heard of a re-compiling install 
before.

>Would that make a significant difference on
>efficiency?  

Maybe, but almost certianly not.

>I have an AMD k6-2 380Mhz box with 96
>megs of ram I'm about to do a reinstall on and was
>wondering if compiling everything would make much of a
>difference.  

Depends alot on what you do with the box.  Do alot of hashing, sorting, 
walking btrees?  Do immense amounts of floating point? Yes, then yes.  No, 
then probably not.  It might help with some things like page alignment, 
use of L1/L2 cache, etc... but probably not anythign you would notice.

>Also, does anyone know if the installer
>"portage" thing can detect your hardware and make
>compiler optimizations for newbies who don't
>neccesarily know what their doing in the programming
>realm? :)

I have no idea,  my out-of-the-air guess would be "No".