yeah, compiling can drag on slower machines, but during the gentoo install (or whenever) you can alter your optimization flags for speed or size and what not.
the reason i prefer the pain of compiling everything from source is that portage gives you full control of conditional compiling through use flags in a framework like apt. its more involved, but you don't have to dig through make files, just run emerge -pv <package atom> and see what you can exclude and what you want to include. so long as you don't miss something incredibly important, it makes things run smoothly (or if you botch it, not at all).
not the most scientific metric, but on this dell inspiron e1505 (intel core duo 2Gz each processor, 100Gig ram) running XP, fruity loops by itself on a clean boot could choke it up if i added 3 vst synths and some intensive effects.
on gentoo, i've ran the jack server with maybe 6-9 other apps at a time for hours while compiling and trying new programs and at one point i recompiled my kernel. after 3 hours not even an xrun.
if compiling is still an issue though, you can create a tool chain with the crossdev package to compile for that architecture on a different gentoo machine that can deal with it. then once you've produced the binaries you can load the customized app onto the target machine. given that most folks don't have another gentoo machine (having one can be trouble enough), i don't think it would be unthinkable that some sort of community crossdev server could be created where packages could be emerged and downloaded from at later times. it would definitely add to the audio distro community as well, because then packages that worked well could be shared without recompiling again.
On Tue Jun 30, 2009 at 03:43:45PM -0700, munkeyfreenix batcat wrote:the archaudio repo probably has binaries, but i havent checked. havent got my head around archs' building stuff tbh..
> I'm runnning my audio laptop on gentoo using alot from the pro-audio
> overlay. couldn't imagine another route.
since compiling (or even running firefox) is pure hell on the Atom N270. i cant imagine theyd be useful for audio given their 1/8th the power of stateoftheart CPUs unless yo just want an instance of ZynAdd or something
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