compiling own Linux programs?

[Adcadet]

I've asked this elsewhere, but never got a satisfactory response. Thus, I post it here, along wtih some background.

My main PC died - I was out celebrating my birthday, and came home to a frozen WinXP. Rebooted, it gave me a hardware error and died. Then, it wouldn't post. It's being RMAed, but it will take a few days to ship the new board from the vendor in California. Thus, I turned to an old, P2-266 I have here. I've got WinME on it and Linux. I tried using WinME, but just couldn't stand it. So I've been booting into RH7.2 to get my stuff done - mostly my class work, but also a bunch of streaming MP3s, general surfing, ect.

After two days of using RH7.2, I realized that KWord couldn't print properly. I used RH's auto-update tool, which updated just about everything via RPMs. My printer now works just fine. But, this PC is slow, and I'm wondering if compiling the various programs myself vs. simply RPMing everything could help with performance. On the up side, it is nice to know that an "outdated" PC can still do 90% of what i want a PC to do....just more slowly.



Thanks!
Adcadet

 

[Mercutio]

You can get some benefit from using processor-specific optimizations in compilation. The benefits of this are dependant on the nature of software. You'll get a lot of mileage out of a well-optimized kernel. I don't even know if you'd notice an optimized version of kword over the precompiled one.

man gcc for details... and you'll probably end up hand-modifying makefiles.

 

[Prof.Wizard]

Too much hassle...