If you do a lot of compiles (Gentoo Users ... take note!) then DistCC is just what the doctor ordered.

The Documentation is pretty good, and the results are great.

I have a Gentoo install on a PIII 800, 768mb RAM machine ... I distributed the compiles across 3 other machines (P4 2.0 ghz winXP, 1gb RAM...Dual P4 2.4 ghz debian, 1gb RAM...Dual PIII 1.0 ghz Win2KServer, 1.5GB RAM).

I did a compile test of the 2.4.22 gentoo-test-sources kernel (Make dep, make clean, make bzImage). I went from 15 Minutes 31 Seconds to 2 Minutes and 48 seconds!

Installation is straight forward. In debian, apt-get distcc gets you the latest version. In gentoo, emerge distcc.

This is an awesome utility....

Here is a How-to and another one for gentoo users.

Another great feature is that you can install Cygwin on windows and then install disctcc and use windows machines to help compile your Linux code! (2 of my distcc machines are Windows based).

I'm running Debian Woody, and it doesn't appear to be a package called 'distcc' in the archive, is there a non-official apt source for woody?

Ops ... I have only installed it on Debian SID...I know it is in the unstable packages at debain.org.

I just tried to look at the packages for testing and stable, but they don't have the http://packages.debian.org server back on-line yet (from the rootkit incdents).

I also looked for a deb file for woody and couldn't find any, but distcc should build OK from the source files on woody (in fact lots of the people who posted testimonials were using woody).

the gentoo KDE and GNOME live cd's come with distcc and toolchains ready to go.
Burn a cd, boot with the boot option cdcache and you can remove the cd to boot every computer in the lab and distcc that gentoo install you always wanted but were too impatient to wait for =P

hey joey you guys dont hangout on #dalnet anymore? I havent chatted with you guys in years! Who was the guy that got fired from fedex? ssomethinX I think....I forget that dude was candid...