SPARC Status (Was Re: Secondary Architecture Status?)

[Matthew Woehlke]

Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> Matthew Woehlke wrote:
>> Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>>> It likely is something worth looking into, but based on my 
>>> experiences with Fedora on my netbook, I am having doubts compiler 
>>> optimizations alone are worth a "secondary arch".
>>>
>>> At least on my netbook, neither "speed" or "space" (mine has a disk) 
>>> are actual problems.
>>
>> Is for me! :-) But I don't think -Os is the solution; the problems 
>> tend to be long dep-chains and data (and especially, the intersection 
>> of both*). 
>
> Do I understand correctly, your issue is disk-space? Are you installing 
> to a (slow?) small solid state disk? 

Yes and yes (although only running updates does slowness seem to be a 
problem; IIRC read speed on SSD's usually exceeds write speed by quite a 
bit).

> How big is it?

I have a little under 3 GB for / and /boot (same partition). The rest is 
/home on a separate partition.

> However, I would not understand issues related to cpu-speed, because my 
> own netbook (Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270 at 1.60GHz, 1 GB RAM) easily 
> outperforms older machines I have around.

Yes. Sorry, I should have been more clear; "space" is the problem. Speed 
not so much; as you say, performance is very adequate :-). It's just the 
process of trying to cram as much usable stuff as possible into the tiny 
SSD that can be challenging. (For example, I'm running KDE, and both OOo 
and Firefox are too big to comfortably fit.)

Having said that... if I bought another netbook today, I would probably 
still stay with an SSD (though I would look for a 16 GB). It's nice to 
not worry about the drive crashing due to vibration :-).

-- 
Matthew
Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies.
-- 
"So long, and thanks for all the fish" -- the dolphins (from Douglas 
Adams' HHGttG)