08.16.05
More gentoo and distcc
Changing the USE flags on Gentoo can result in massive rebuilds. Changing the C compiler flags rebuilds everything. Normally this would be an overnight thing on my main PC but when it’s my 750MHz Duron it becomes a real ordeal. So, to ease this pain I figured I’d enlist the help of distcc to allow me to use the CPU power of the 4 other 2GHz+ machines I have in the house in rebuilding the system – sounds easy, right?
Yeah, thought so. Well, first attempt was using the 64 bit Gentoo installation I did on the weekend to cross compile for the x86 system. I set up the cross compiler without too much of a problem but unfortunately for me, it just didn’t seem to work well with distcc, even on a quick “Hello World” test app. I’m not about to rebuild my entire system unless I’m sure that the compiler is working properly, so on to the next thing to try.
I found a wiki article on how to cross compile on cygwin with distcc. Again, I went through the steps of getting it working and got stumped at the “look through the ebuild file for XXX” and to my great surprise, XXX didn’t exist! Oh well… on to the next thing to try!
For my next trick, I installed Gentoo onto a vmware image and worked at getting distcc set up with that image. I even tried to get the same compiler options going, and 6 hours of installing Gentoo later, I was getting weird errors in the build about libraries suspiciously moving! Well, that was no good so I’m now just falling back to the good old “build the whole thing on the slow computer” trick. Should be done sometime next week I guess…
Well, lesson learned I guess. Don’t mess with things that you haven’t tested trying to get a “quick fix”.
(Yes, I’ve been geeky lately on this blog. I’ll write something interesting one day soon I promise)