The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.0.2. KDE 3.0.2 primarily provides useability and stability enhancements over KDE 3.0.1, which shipped in late May 2002. The new KDE version also compiles with GCC 3.1, so it would be a great opportunity to build it manually for better perfomance (change the “i686” option with the kind of CPU you have).
KDE 3.0.2 Released
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Eugenia Loli
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Glad to see this, its a fantastic environment.
Typical though, just finished compiling 3.0.1 last night and then this happens.
The only good thing is that I will get a change to recompile using GCC 3.1, should give a useful speed boost.
And keramik is a fantastic style combined with Crystal Icons theme. Best looking desktop out there!
Daryl.
Nice build guide… although I would suggest adding ‘-fomit-frame-pointer’ (only for non-debug use) and ‘-pipe’ to the CPP and CXX flags… there also is no point of spec’ing -mcpu when you got the -march option.
I have experienced -fomit-frame-pointer to give the best performance boost…
If you want to always have these optimizations defaulted I can suggest adding them to /etc/profile (debian) or /etc/make.conf (gentoo). This is what my looks like:
export CHOST=”i686-pc-linux-gnu”
export CFLAGS=”-march=i686 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -fexpensive-optimizations -frerun-cse-after-loop -frerun-loop-opt -malign-functions=4″
export CXXFLAGS=”-march=i686 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -fexpensive-optimizations -frerun-cse-after-loop -frerun-loop-opt -malign-functions=4″
As you see, kind of freaky optimizations, if something gets unstable (very seldom happens) it’s normally due to -O3, whicch I change to -O2.
Of course I only use GCC 3.1 nowadays…. =)
Cheers
I’d like to know if there are some program that won’t compile correctly with it now
Apps that some people report problems with, others won’t. I think that often GCC 3.x is the firt to blame when someone fails to compile and run an application properly.
In the installation docs for most recent apps they state any compiler issues solvings if there are any.
The best is probably to try yourself and see, having 2.95.x as a fallback. I’ve had very few problems, then with apps that worked in the next version.
there also is no point of spec’ing -mcpu when you got the -march option.
There isn’t unless you are compiling for many machines..
-march optimizes the binaries for a given level of x86 architecture (in the case of i386/i586/i686 — forget other CPU’s for the sake of this discussion)
-mcpu ensures the lowest “revision” of CPU core that the binary will run on
e.g. “-march=i686 -mcpu=i586” means “optimize for P-III level architecture (Katmai and above, with SSE) but ensure that the resulting binary will run on a Pentium classic”
Just a clarification…
Cheers,
Ken
Katmai and above, with SSE
Just to be safe
I didn’t mean to imply that those options would generate SSE instructions. I don’t know that GCC can do so…
Cheers,
Ken
Thanks, Ken! That’s the single most helpful tip I’ve ever seen for gcc.
I have found the following build options to increase performance dramatically without any stability issues at all on my Gentoo boxen both at work and home.
CFLAGS=”-mcpu=i686 -march=i686 -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -fforce-addr -funroll-loops -frerun-cse-after-loop -frerun-loop-opt -malign-functions=4″
CXXFLAGS=”-mcpu=i686 -march=i686 -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -fforce-addr -funroll-loops -frerun-cse-after-loop -frerun-loop-opt -malign-functions=4″
I just noticed someone using -pipe in the above comments, and it sounds like it could increase the build speed of gcc, but I’m assuming that it doesn’t speed up application runtime? I guess I should add it to my list of flags as well… Anyway, I’ve heard about some AMD specific optimisations being included in gcc-3.x, and I was wondering if anybody has played with them. I have an Athlon XP 1600+, and I would like to squeeze every last bit of speed out of it.
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Travis
Also, does anybody know when keramik will become the default style for KDE? I’ve played around with the very hacked together keramik style available for download from kde-look.org, and I love the way it looks; however, I’ve found it to be quite buggy(i.e., konqueror crashes everytime I try to close it), and I’m not willing to sacrafice stability for eye-candy.
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Travis
Slashdot doesn’t have the story yet.
I am running Suse 8 right now. I wanted to know whether recompiling KDE from scratch means that I lose all the stuff that is specific to this distro.
aaahh… I cant help myself. I just have to shout out my shoutouts to the KDE community cause this Graphical environment is just outstanding!! I use KDE at home and at work all day and all night long! se tout.
/jens
Has anybody had success emerge’ing this with Gentoo? I tried ’emerge –update kde’ and the process died with an error message. It was something like “failure with emake.”
Was I the only person to experience this, and if so, does anybody know what I should do about it?
Check out the today’s archives of the gentoo-dev mailing list at lists.gentoo.org. Someone else also had a problem.
And keramik is a fantastic style combined with Crystal Icons theme. Best looking desktop out there!
Well, I heard Evaldo said he is making a Crystal window decoration for Crystal 1.0. Well, the screenshots look nice, but what I like best about it is the drop shadow. But there is no code
Also, does anybody know when keramik will become the default style for KDE? I’ve played around with the very hacked together keramik style available for download from kde-look.org, and I love the way it looks; however, I’ve found it to be quite buggy(i.e., konqueror crashes everytime I try to close it), and I’m not willing to sacrafice stability for eye-candy.
The one at kde-look.org is outdated. The one at the CVS is only for the CVS version of KDE. Conclusion: Keramik isn’t ready yet :-). Keramik would be default in KDE 3.1. The one on the CVS I heard is much more stable, much more configuarable and so on, but unfortunately, it doesn’t build on KDE 3.0.x because it is OLD (haha, well, compared to the CVS version).
I am running Suse 8 right now. I wanted to know whether recompiling KDE from scratch means that I lose all the stuff that is specific to this distro.
Yes, you would loose them. Try using the source code used to make the SuSE RPMs cause they have SuSE-specific scripts and so on. For example, if you compile it like any other system, you would find your KMenu entries had dissapeared.
OT: Hmmm, did you know that Microsoft would have a booth at LinuxWorld? I wonder if they scraped Windows .NET Server and went for Linux .NET Server, or better still, Office 11 for KDE 🙂
who needs an unstable product like Office on linux? =P
(I hope that KDE fixes its load of lil crash from GUI)