I noticed Chris’ post WRT the relative slowness of gnome-terminal vs xterm.

I’m waiting just now to take Kate’s remaining belongings to her brothers’, so while I’ve got a few minutes I thought I’d investigate myself.

Chris was winging about make clean, which is obviously going to be the worst case. Although that’s interesting, I thought I’d look at an actual compile, so I benchmarked a kernel compile.

~src/kernel/2.6.9-uml$ time make ARCH=um V=1

Obviously konsole on another desktop is sort of cheating. The konsoles, gnome-terminal and aterm are all running transparent. That is with the desktop image showing through but slightly faded towards white. xterm is just using a plain white background. konsole and gnome-terminal are also using anti-aliased fonts, whereas aterm and xterm aren’t.

Chris, being one of the fvwm crowd ;), likes the speed of xterm, and fair enough. Personally I like to see my pretty desktop backgrounds, and anti-aliased fonts I can’t live without – so I’ll stick with konsole.

It’s good to know though that if I’m running some compile that generates lots of output for no good reason, I should plonk the window on another desktop. I actually do that usually anyway, to stop it annoying me. I use this little script to let me know when a long compile or the like has finished.

#!/bin/bash

eval $@
if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
    kdialog --msgbox "Command '$@' in $(pwd) completed." 2> /dev/null
else
    kdialog --error "Command '$@' in $(pwd) failed!" 2> /dev/null
    exit 1
fi
exit 0

And now I’m off to deliver some boxes. One step closer to a sane house!