[TriLUG] Linux from scratch project?

[Ken MacKenzie via TriLUG]

Yeah there is a limit to how  crazy I will get with things.  After doing a
BSD install always compiling from the ports tree I realized time in did not
net me positive performance savings out for that.

So these days debian is my preferred world.  Stable mostly but as things
become too dated I work in test unless it is a server.

I have a few lingering Linux Mint installs here that will eventually be
swapped for debian.

Ken

On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 11:45 AM, Igor Partola via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org
> wrote:

> I used to suffer from Gentoo-ism. I would not recommend it to anyone that's
> remotely a perfectionist precisely because it exposes details to the user
> that you otherwise don't know are there. Here is what used to be my
> installation process to get optimal performance out of Gentoo:
>
> 1. Boot up the base system from a CD.
> 2. Compile the base system using the compiler on the CD.
> 3. Re-compile the base system using the newly compiled base system
> compiler, since it is a newer version of GCC and thus might have
> optimizations that the CD version of GCC did not have.
> 4. Re-compile the base system using the newest compiler, in order to take
> advantage of optimizations in the new version of GCC that were compiled in
> with itself.
>
> This would take me roughly 2-3 days because of the stop and go nature of
> it. Whenever a new version of the GCC package came out, I would redo steps
> 2-4 to upgrade everything.
>
> It got so bad that I ended up setting up a cross-compiling stack on a
> second computer along with ccache so that compilation results for things
> that did not change would go faster. That's right, I had a computing farm
> just to get Gentoo running on my laptop.
>
> Did I mention that I wanted my Gentoo box to be as fast as possible, so I
> would manually tweak all the compiler flags? Also, I ran openbox as my
> window manager to save system resources. XKDE, Gnome, and KDE were just too
> bloated for me at the time.
>
> On the plus side I learned a lot about how the system boots, how to rescue
> a broken Linux install, how a distro is put together, etc. At some point,
> someone on the Internet convinced me that I should give Ubuntu a try and I
> did not look back.
>
> Igor
>
>