Welcome to debian-i586 project web site.

debian-i586 is a project to create/produce a tuned/optimized Debian GNU/Linux distribution for i586 (Pentium class) processors or higher, just like Linux-Mandrake does.

* debian-i586 project summary at http://sourceforge.net/projects/debian-i586/

in the News:
2001.07.12 - The unofficial debian-i586 project founded (debinplanet.org)

Reference:
 - Debian Automatic Package Building System, "buildd (build daemon)"
- Turtle, a simple autobuilder used for Debian/Hurd
- Why isn"t Debian 'ported' to the higher x86 machines? (debianplanet.org)
- Pentium-Builder

Replaces gcc, cc, and g++ with scripts that build pentium optimized code. (Other processors can be optimized for as well.)
By default, after installing this package, the compilers will behave normally. However, if the environment variable DEBIAN_BUILDARCH=pentium is set, they will enter pentium optimized compile mode.
- Athlon-Builder
athlon-builder released (debianplanet.org)
- BSD's "make world" scheme
- Debian Package Repository Howto -- 7. Optimization for Pentiums
The standard Debian binary packages are built for i386 processors, not Pentiums. They are also often built without any optimization.

This is a Good Thing for a distribution, since it will work on the most hardware. But if you're responsible a site with nothing older than a Pentium-II, you might prefer binary packages built for Pentiums.

7.1 binary-i586

To minimize confusion, we will want to specify a new architecture for our packages: i586. We can force this by making changes to the usrbin/dpkg-architecture/ file: 

--- dpkg-architecture~  Sun May 20 11:46:22 2001
+++ dpkg-architecture   Sun May 20 14:57:17 2001
@@ -48,6 +48,8 @@
 require 'controllib.pl';
 
 %archtable=('i386',      'i386-linux',
+               'i586',      'i586-linux',
+               'i686',      'i686-linux',
            'sparc',     'sparc-linux',
            'sparc64',   'sparc64-linux',
            'alpha',     'alpha-linux',
@@ -90,7 +92,7 @@
 sub rewrite_gnu_cpu {
        local ($_) = @_;
 
-       s/(?:i386|i486|i586|i686|pentium)(.*linux)/i386$1/;
+       s/(?:i386|i486|i586|i686|pentium)(.*linux)/i586$1/;
        s/ppc/powerpc/;
        return $_;
 }
The rest of the upload process should run as expected, ultimately resulting in the packages being stored under binary-i586 instead of binary-i386.

7.2 CFLAGS

Many packages can be optimized for a pentium by adding CFLAGS='-O2 -mpentium' to your environment before building the packages.

Unfortunately, many packages specify the CFLAGS internally. To find them, it is usually enough to grep for "CFLAGS" in the debian/rules file. You must then set up a CVS archive as discussed above, then add -O2 -mpentium to the CFLAGS assignment.

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