Linux From Scratch

[lepidotós]

It seems like an interesting option, has anyone tried it, especially on their 32-bit machines? Specifically, compiling for your own CPU seems like the best way to squeeze as much performance as possible, same reason for 10.4Fx to come in four CPU flavors. Would be interesting to compare it to Kubuntu 12/Adélie.
There's an old guide from 2011 still on their servers for those who want to give it a shot, can't guarantee it works.​

 

[Mirage256]

I've never tried it on PowerPC, only on an x86 box back around ~2012 or so, not long after this guide was written. It's a fun project and definitely gave me some more insight into how building software works on Linux, and I'd highly recommend anyone give it a shot if you're interested, on a spare partition or machine. I imagine it'll take a while on anything less than a G5, especially when you get to GCC.

If LFS' idea of compiling from source catches your eye, I'd also point you to Gentoo, which has the advantage of portage helping to resolve dependencies and automatically entering all the build flags for you. It additionally may let you take advantage of the GentooLTO project, which automatically applies a bunch of cool optimization tricks that go way beyond anything I've seen in any other distro, although it does greatly lengthen compile time and can require a lot of RAM, and I'm not sure how well it works on PowerPC since I've yet to try that. When I have some spare time in the future, I should see if it works...

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

You have to be very patient for this project . My Quad G5 (waiting for repair) took around 2,5 hours for kernel.

 

[Amethyst1]

Specifically, compiling for your own CPU seems like the best way to squeeze as much performance as possible, [...]

Gentoo Linux also does that

 

[dextructor]

I love optimizations, really do, but know how to optimize it's a whole different story. That's why really good engineers are worth their time.

Since Voidlinux will drop the "Old PPC" ports and their builds til this day it's really good optimized, LFS it's an option, but other members made their point about Gentoo being "more friendly" when talking about dependencies when compiling from source.

I'm afraid that Gentoo will be the future because most other distro's (I'm still waiting for Adélie Linux come out of beta) are incomplete or with with more bugs because technology still evolving and not every good developer has time or resources to fix this old architecture.