[ILUG] Optimizing for Pentium Pt.2

[John Gay]

A while ago I asked what other packages I should optomize for Pentium. One 
person answered GlibC. This got me thinking about GCC itself, so I asked on 
another list and got a few answers, most were "don't even think about it" but 
a few suggested GCC and one pointed me to Linux From Scratch.

After having a good search around the lfs site, I've decided I'm going to 
give it a whirl. I've got a spare box and loads of free time, so why not ;-)

The lfs site, however warns NOT to use optimizations when compiling GCC or 
GlibC? A quick google found PGCC, a Pentium optimizing patch for GCC, but the 
site does not seem to have been updated in quite some time?

So, my general plan, and I'm taking my time with this:

Partition the hard drive for the lfs set-up with 4 partitions, /, /usr, /var 
and /home.
Install a base Debian system into the /home  partition so I can build the 
rest of the system into the other partitions.
Using Debian, build the initial packages into the / and /usr partitions. I'll 
try to optimize GCC and GlibC in this first stage.
chroot to the / partition and re-build the base packages for shared libs.
strip de-bugging from the binaries and change the boot so the system boot 
from / rather than /home, then move /home to it's proper partition.

All going well, I should now have a full base Linux system running that is 
fully optimized for my PentiumMMX including GCC and GlibC.

Now I can build zlib and then X, again optimizing. And I can follow this with 
the various graphics libs, qt lib and finally KDE.

If all goes well, I will probably repeate this for my Dual system, once I can 
find a match for the slot1 550Mhz PIII Iv'e got.

I might even be tempted to write this up for the site.

Cheers,

	John Gay