Compiler options for AMD K6-II 533Mhz

["Sandeep Khanna" <sandeep khanna villanova edu>]

Hi All,

Question:
What are the best compiler options for compiling software in general, 
Garnome in specific for my laptop which is a Compaq 12XL125 AMD K6-II 
533 Mhz 192 Mb RAM 30Gb HDD ?

Background....
I have always heard, beleived that Linux is much faster than Windows. I 
have been using Linux (first Redhat, currently Mandrake 9) with GNOME 
since past 2 years on my laptop. But, I have always found Windows 2000 
on my other partition to be much faster (with similar applications like 
Mozilla, OpenOffice pre-loaded) than Linux. Altough, I agree that I have 
seen quite a noticeable difference between Gnome 1.4 and Gnome2. I also 
compiled Garnome (currently 0.18.3) but still didn't find it anywhere 
near to my Win2K installation. From various newsgroups I also got to 
know that Mandrake is currently a better if not the best optimised 
distribution for older AMD, Pentium based machines. Unfortunately, it 
didn't look like it.

OpenOffice/StarOffice don't start in the first go due to low memory and 
eventually startup since they would have bumped off (swapped) the other 
programs and would be having parts of it in the cache. Thus, XXXOffice 
would startup eventually after one or two tries. This makes me question 
the Linux Memory Management.

Mozilla as distributed with Mandrake was slow as hell to start, scroll 
longer web-pages, etc. The one that I downloaded and installed directly 
from mozilla.org was much much faster. Again, Looks like Mandrake's 
compiler options weren't good enough for me !

So, Before I switch to a distribution like Gentoo, I want to try to 
compile Garnome using compiler options specific for my processor this time.

Thanks in advance,
Sandeep Khanna