Ordinarily I avoid recompiling like the plague. For me it has always been slow, error-prone and indecipherable.

That’s what makes ABS and makepkg infinitely cool for me. Everything is automated, yet customizable. Just as a test, I followed the informal tutorial on the forums, and supplemented it with the wiki pages.

For now I’ve edited my makepkg.conf file to (I hope) better reflect my hardware.

export CARCH="PENTIUM2"
export CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
export CFLAGS="-march=pentium2 -Os -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
export CXXFLAGS="-march=pentium2 -Os -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"

Those flags come from the Gentoo wiki, although I’m not sure PENTIUM2 is the correct CARCH flag. I can’t seem to find a page anywhere that shows what CARCH should be. It seems to work, but leaving it as “i686” also worked.

I tested this with aterm, as in the example, but also with the Openbox package and everything works great. I think I might work on some other stuff, and see what improvements I can get.