*BSD News Article 4867


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uunet!usc!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!spool.mu.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-picayune.mit.edu!athena.mit.edu!eichin
From: eichin@athena.mit.edu (Mark W. Eichin)
Subject: Re: which X386 in agate is better?
In-Reply-To: wjin@cs.uh.edu's message of Wed, 9 Sep 1992 21:18:47 GMT
Message-ID: <EICHIN.92Sep11043000@tsx-11.mit.edu>
Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system)
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Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
References: <1992Sep9.031159.13322@cucs5.cs.cuhk.hk> <sxsnztn.hasty@netcom.com>
	<1992Sep9.211847.10985@menudo.uh.edu>
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1992 08:30:11 GMT
Lines: 27

> Is there any archive site which has 'stripped' X11 binaries ?
> Downloading 12M bytes of X386 server only (even though it is compressed)
> does not make sense to me since I'll never debug X386 server.
	Since I run at the end of a SLIP line (38,400 wire, but still
not ethernet) and I've mostly filled a 200M disk, I wanted a smaller
release for a lot of reasons... there are two things I've done that
you might find helpful (that I'd also like to see in any future X
binary release):
	1) strip all binaries. If I care, I'll build with symbols. If
*you* care, write a version of "pirts" and keep the symbols yourself.
[pirts is a reverse strip, I've seen a few people write them under BSD
-- it takes the symbols and puts them in a different file. Then, when
debugging something, you should be able to tell gdb "symbol-file
foo.syms" and have it look there instead of in the exec-file...]
	2) compress all the fonts. The X11R5 has inline code to
uncompress them on the fly... all you have to do with the current
release is remember to delete fonts.dir and run mkfontdir again in
each of the font directories (75dpi, 100dpi, misc.) I haven't noticed
any performance difference.
	My current installation only uses 40M (compressing the fonts
saves 6M by itself; stripping X386 saves over 10M...) and has *all* of
the user-level functionality of the original release...
				_Mark_ <eichin@athena.mit.edu>
				MIT Student Information Processing Board
				Cygnus Support <eichin@cygnus.com>
ps. Above numbers using the agate:ports... version of Xfree86, not the
one in pub/incoming.