[Trisquel-users] Re : installing from source vs normal install
Right, thanks for making that clear(er) ;-)
[Trisquel-users] Re : installing from source vs normal install
I know. But you do not need "dpkg-dev" if you do not build .deb packages, hence the description of "build-essential": If you do not plan to build Debian packages, you don't need this package.
[Trisquel-users] Re : installing from source vs normal install
"build-essential" is for those who build .deb packages. The description of "build-essential" starts with: If you do not plan to build Debian packages, you don't need this package. The "make" package provides GNU Make, the "gcc" package provides GCC, "libc-dev" provides the GNU C library, etc.
[Trisquel-users] Re : installing from source vs normal install
I was actually talking about the options the developers propose, typically to enable/disable optional modules. About the generic optimizations the compiler makes, you had better stick to at most -O2 because some programs show problems with -O3. The options -march=native an -mtune=native enable optimizations that depend on the instruction sets your CPU support. But, again, do not expect any visible gain of performance.
[Trisquel-users] Re : installing from source vs normal install
Besides not having to trust anybody (whoever builds the software could use different sources, possibly including malware), the main advantage of installing software from source is that you can choose the compilation options to get exactly what you want. On the other hand, compiling is very time/energy consuming (hours for large programs). If you believe you will get improved performance, forget it: sure, the compiler can take into account your specific CPU architecture to make a few additional optimizations but you will have a hard time measuring any difference, whereas you will definitely see the time you want for the compilation to be over! If the laptop has 1GB of RAM, consider Trisquel Mini.
