That does clarify things. Thank you :) On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 12:02 AM, Eric F Crist <ecrist at secure-computing.net>wrote: > 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 > > > > > -- Art: http://www.coroflot.com/bellsoffreedom -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20081001/0b2027c4/attachment.htm