Recompiling everything with the Intel C++ compiler

[mistinthenight]

Well, I'm new to linux. I started using Fedora but I left it due mainly to two things: bugs and slowness.

 

Mandrake is -in my limited experience- more stable and faster. But it is not enought. When I use my XP machine at work, I get a feeling of smoothness: everything works great: browsing web pages, working with windows, etc, etc. My home machine matches the office box: a 2.53Mhz P4 with 1GB RAM and a Radeon 9700 Pro. My premise is that speed diference in simple things like those should not be noticeable. However I can't remove from my head the feeling that I'm using a third world operating system at home.

 

Solutions?

1. Give a try to FC3. People say it seems to be real fast now.

2. Use Gentoo. From everything I read, it's supposely the fastest distro around. However I'm new to linux, and I just don't have the knowledge to run it.

3. Recompile all what I can using a faster compiler in Mandrake 10.

 

Where I need the speed is clearly in KDE, so this could be a good chance to compile the new 3.3.1 version. However, all its dependencies should be also recompiled.

 

Do you know if it is very hard to change the default compiler from gcc to Intel's one ? I don't know if this is somewhat configurable and simple to do or if I'll meet hell in the process. Any comment on its viability would be really great.

 

Thanks !

 

 

Moved from Software forum to Terminal Shell Commands, Kernel and Programming by Artificial Intelligence

Edited October 16, 2004 by Artificial Intelligence

[arthur]

I'd guess that's a newly-formatted windows XP you have there. My suggestion is, go for gentoo, arch or slackware linux. Mandrake does NOT have a reputation for being fast. And there are easier ways to speed it up rather than recompiling everything from the ground up (in which case you're better off using gentoo). so the short answer to your question: yes, it's absolutely crazy.

 

intel's C/C++ compiler is not free, by the way. Almost everything in linux is compiled with gcc, so I reckon the intel website would have more information on compiling stuff for linux using the intel compiler.

[avadis]

If you are sufficiently experienced change to Slackware 10. Be sure to format your partitions using the reiserfs file system. Your system will run significantly faster than Windows or Mandrake and it will be very stable. Plus you do not have to join a club to get the latest KDE software, it is freely available.

[BluesRenegade]

I read the suggestion to go to Slackware 10. I'll go a step further since you're willing to recompile everything. If you're savvy enough to do that, then why not go all the way?

 

Create your OWN custom installation (distribution, if you want to think of it as that)!! Check out Linux from scratch (LFS) at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

 

LFS is not a distribution, but a How-To project that is put out in book form.

 

There is also a BLFS (Basic Linux From Scratch), which has OpenOffice and a few apps so you're not starting from nothing but an O/S. But the premise is the same.

 

Want to REALLY understand what you're running and how to control and configure it? Build it from scratch. Learn how the kernel, scripts, etc. all work by compiling yourself and writing yourself.

 

I've looked at Knoppix, SuSE, Red Hat, and now, Mandrake. SuSE was the best so far and as I recall it also used the Reiserfs File System.

 

I have 2 hard drives and use one exclusively for Linux evals/learning. From what I've seen so far, Linux is NOT ready for the desktop, not as an immediate replacement for Windows (I wish it was though!). The reason I say that is simple. Uninstalling an application and then installing the latest version should be a breeze. It is anything but that in Linux. Even something as simple as installing the Java Runtime Environment for Mozilla can take a newbie hours of researching (unless the person just installs software haphazardly, and even then, it's likely to crash Mozilla or not work at all).

 

NOWHERE did I find COMPLETE installation instructions for the Java Runtime Environment, but between the various bits I did find at Sun and Mozilla and these forums, I finally figured out what is REALLY required to do it right. And I did have to use Find and Slocate to search out where all the Mozilla directories are located (the redundancy is one of the most confusing parts of software installation in Linux). Why are there 2 Mozilla directories, for example. One is simply called Mozilla, while the other one has the version number tagged on the end of the dir name (Mozilla-1.7.2).

 

As one person added, he's been a Linux user for 2 years and he still considers himself a newbie. How in the world are people that struggle with Windows with its simple Setup programs and Uninstall programs ever going to deal with Linux?? No wonder Bill Gates is so confident that Windows doesn't have much to fear from Linux.

 

I wish someone, some organization (preferably non-profit) would prove Bill WRONG by making Linux truly user-friendly. And not just with GUI's thrown on top of everything, but truly simple software installs and uninstalls. There are only 3 possibilities for software installs in Linux, from my limited experience. 1)the /usr/<appname>/ location where anyone could possibly run the app; 2)the /usr/local/<appname>/ location where only local users on that box could run the app; and 3)the user's own /home/<username>/<appname>/ location.

 

So explain to me why I find /usr/lib/mozilla/ and /usr/lib/mozilla-1.7.2/ directories in my Mandrake distro? Better yet, just eliminate the redundancy. It's obvious that as soon as I upgrade to Mozilla 1.8 I will have problems with what's left behind in /mozilla-1.7.2 directory unless I can figure out how to properly uninstall 1.7.2 version first!! I dare anyone to tell me where those instructions are COMPLETELY documented!!

 

(Sorry for the ranting, but it wasn't too far from the topic, was it? lol)

 

Blues

[papaschtroumpf]

That's weird, things should feel pretty smooth on your machine.

 

Do you have hardware acceleration enabled for you video card? this would be the most likely culprit for things not feeling smooth. I'm not sure how you do it for an ATI card, but installing the NVIDIA drivers on my machine (XP2700+) sure helps make things feel more snappy.

 

Also your drives should use UDMA mode, you can check if they do with hdparm, although I would expect Mandrake to have set them up properly.

 

There used to be instructions on the 'net on how to setup gcc to optimize your build of linux components (google for it), although if you really insist on compiling everything I would use Gentoo, which does it by default.

 

I'm guessing your problem is graphic drivers related though, you have a powerful enough processor and enough RAM that mdk-10 should run smooth out of the box.

Edited October 27, 2004 by papaschtroumpf