On Sun, 2006-04-23 at 09:21 -0400, Hugo Garcia wrote:
It is an intel dual core box. I was planning on doing http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ but would like to build SuSE if I can.
Linux from scratch is nice as a learning tool - I certainly learned a lot from it. But the absence of a package management system makes it difficult to maintain, unless you're very dilligent about documenting exactly how you compile and install each package so that you can refer back to it when you want to update or recompile something to add support for something. So if you're looking to learn, LFS is a good project. If you're just looking for a little extra performance, don't bother unless you have a *lot* of time on your hands. LFS (and Gentoo, to a far lesser degree) is a good learning experience, but, even on the fastest machines, it takes lots and lots and lots of time. If you machine is 32bit, just install ordinary SUSE with the SMP kernel. If it's 64bit, again just install 64bit SUSE with the SMP kernel. You can roll your own kernel - configure the kernel for your particular CPU - if you want to squeeze a little bit extra from it. The only other package I've recompiled in SUSE that really gave me a performance boost was QT - assuming you're a KDE user. I'm currently running 64bit gentoo on my notebook (SUSE 10.0's hardware support isn't too good for this model, I'm waiting for 10.1). It's compiled for amd64, with -mtune=k8, which means it's about as optimised for this CPU as it gets. After four months of comipiling and re-compiling stuff to get everything I want with support for everything I want/need, everything is running smoothly now, but I really can't honestly tell you it's faster than SUSE 64bit was. Hans