The standard Debian binary packages are built for i386 processors, not Pentiums. They are also often built without any optimization.
This is a Good Thing for a distribution, since it will work on the most hardware. But if you're responsible a site with nothing older than a Pentium-II, you might prefer binary packages built for Pentiums.
binary-i586
To minimize confusion, we will want to specify a new architecture
for our packages: i586
. We can force this by making changes
to the usr
bin/dpkg-architecture/ file:
--- dpkg-architecture~ Sun May 20 11:46:22 2001
+++ dpkg-architecture Sun May 20 14:57:17 2001
@@ -48,6 +48,8 @@
require 'controllib.pl';
%archtable=('i386', 'i386-linux',
+ 'i586', 'i586-linux',
+ 'i686', 'i686-linux',
'sparc', 'sparc-linux',
'sparc64', 'sparc64-linux',
'alpha', 'alpha-linux',
@@ -90,7 +92,7 @@
sub rewrite_gnu_cpu {
local ($_) = @_;
- s/(?:i386|i486|i586|i686|pentium)(.*linux)/i386$1/;
+ s/(?:i386|i486|i586|i686|pentium)(.*linux)/i586$1/;
s/ppc/powerpc/;
return $_;
}
The rest of the upload process should run as expected, ultimately
resulting in the packages being stored under binary-i586
instead
of binary-i386
.
CFLAGS
Many packages can be optimized for a pentium by adding
CFLAGS='-O2 -mpentium'
to your environment before building
the packages.
Unfortunately, many packages specify the CFLAGS internally.
To find them, it is usually enough to grep for "CFLAGS" in
the debian/rules
file. You must then set up a CVS
archive as discussed above, then add -O2 -mpentium
to the
CFLAGS assignment.