M. Edward Borasky wrote:
On Tue, 2005-01-18 at 15:45 +1000, Stuart Longland wrote:Not everything is about the mhz ;) Mips != x86. I have an Sparc Ultra 1 ( 143 mhz / 320 megs of ram ) and it performs wonderfully on gentoo. Even better is that I have all this choice in what to have on it and not have service bloat. x86 as an architecture sucks horribly compared to older RISC models, although lately it's getton better. You run-of-the-mill mips box will cream an x86 box. Thats why you see PPC clocked at 1.5/2.0ghz creaming x86 box's of twice the speed. So no, they are not dead. Yeah, they are a little slow at compiling. You learn to deal with it as a user.
Hi, I'm chiming in rather late on this debate. Many of you are asking about whether splitting the ebuilds would make a significant difference to the testing of the KDE packages.
In order to successfully test every component in KDE, one must compile and install every component in KDE. At the moment that's a pretty big task on its own, involving the compilation of some 20 or so rather large packages. These packages are in large lumps of smaller pieces -- and you're proposing to distribute KDE in the form of these pieces, rather than the big lumps that the KDE developers produce.
Just the other night I was pointed to this thread by the discussion going on in #gentoo-mips. So I figured I'd try a little experiment.
I made a little shell script that unpacked kdebase-3.3.1 into a directory, ran ./configure (setting the cache file of course), running make distclean to purge the makefiles, then running ./configure again -- timing it as it did so. I also timed a ./configure -n (as suggested by hackeron_).
The results:
First Run: 36min 15.996sec Second Run: 22min 56.704sec Third Run: 2min 56.696sec
Now, take into account, that kdebase has some 40 or so packages within it. Add that up, you're looking at more than 2 hours spent sitting in front of a machine watching a ./configure script. It's even worse if the work directory is cleaned out and fresh source unpacked.
The machine in question has the following specifications:
Silicon Graphics Indy
CPU: MIPS R4600 SC 133MHz A low end machine by SGI standards
RAM: 256MB 72-pin ECC That's the maximum for an Indy
HDD: 9GB IBM SCSI
OS: Gentoo 1.4.16, compiled for MIPS-III
Let me ask a potentially politically incorrect question. How many other
distros are there that will even run on this box? Is Gentoo the only
Linux hope for a 133 MHz MIPS? How well would a full-blown or even
partial KDE run on it?
IIRC Debian is the only other distro that runs on mips ( excluding netBSD because it's not linux ). Mips is a tricky arch to get working and there are a lot of factors but overall it's worth it, IMHO.
I have a 133 MHz Pentium MMX, admittedly with only 32 MB of RAM. I just barely got Debian Woody to run in it, and KDE (2.something!) was a stretch. It would come up, but it wasn't very responsive. I ended up going to the Enlightenment desktop on it. Funny thing is, this machine (Libretto 70CT, actually) did a very good job with Windows 95, and I've heard of folks successfully running NT 4.0 on them.
When is it time to take these old things out behind the barn and shoot
them?
When you pry them from my dead cold hands? :)
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-- Alec Warner Spartasoft Secretary ( spartasoft.msu.edu ) Junior Computer Science Michigan State University [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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