2006-10-23

Rebuilding freetype on Debian

My rather slow desktop (450mhz) is becoming more and more sluggish.

A friend insisted that I should try compiling [1] libfreetype for my machine. Debian uses "-g -O2" for the official libfreetype6 package, which I turned to "-O3 -march=k6-2" in debian/rules.

apt-get build-dep libfreetype6
apt-get source libfreetype6
cd freetype-2.2.1
vi debian/rules
dpkg-buildpackage -b -nc -rfakeroot
dpkg -i ../libfreetype*.deb


The optimisation flags helped a lot. Firefox seems a bit more lightweight now, gimp does font-kerning in 'no time' and gnome-commander displays directory entries much much faster.

I should note here that according to the info pages of gcc [2] -mmmx and -m3dnow do not add any optimisations to the source code. They simply enable the corresponding cpu operations in the form of builtin functions, such as:

v8qi __builtin_ia32_paddb (v8qi, v8qi)


kudos to vvas
[1] apt-build automates package building/upgrading on Debian
[2] pinfo is a nice browser for info pages btw..

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