On Sep 30, 2008, at 11:30 PM, Nick Scholtes wrote: > Hi Eric, > > Maybe I misunderstood the whole "rebuild" thing. You said: > <Many applications can be built natively on Linux with little, or > no, modification. In most cases, there is no reason to 'rebuild' an > application.> > > Could you explain this more? Maybe this is what I was thinking of. Nick, Many, maybe most, applications are offered as pre-compiled binaries. For the vast majority of people, these pre-compiled binaries will work fine. That being said, there are applications written for Solaris, FreeBSD, other, that are written closely enough for generic *nix, that they can follow the same ol' ./configure && make && make install routine, with little or no modification. The fact of the matter is that more applications than not are written and already compiled against the Linux kernel. Re-compiling will give you very little benefit. Some fringe cases where the extra work may pay off involve special hardware. Whether it is simply old hardware (low RAM/slow proc) or embedded systems, or specialty hardware (Gx Macs, alpha, etc). If you're running x86 or x64 on modern hardware, don't waste your time compiling, if there's a binary available. Last, the biggest benefit of pre-compiled packages is the fact that they're packages. This includes a mechanism to install the necessary dependencies and configuration files. Source, typically, only compiles the binaries. Here, again, you're best off using the packages/RPMs/ports/etc. HTH --- Eric Crist