Disclaimer - I can only help with REAL crazyness!

> Ok, I'm still struggling with these P100 machines that I am trying to run
> Star Office on.  The problem is that under windows SO loads in 1 min or
> less, but it's not stable.  Under linux it takes over 5 min to load, but is
> stable, but by the time it's done loading the class is partially over, so
> it's unacceptable... and no it's not a lack of memory problem.

You are sure its not a memory problem?  

What's the specs on the machines?  Memory, ethernet (and network load, and
is the card in promiscuous mode), video, etc.  What kind of disk drives?
(I assume that its the same machine that loads SO under wind* in around
one minute....)

> a while ago I heard of a way to "compile" perl programs by causeing a core
> dump and then executing that core dump as a binary executable.   I was
> thinking that if I could do the same thing with SO that I could load the
> whole thing on these slow machines in about 10 seconds.. beating windows by
> a lot.
> 
> If anyone has any ideas how I could do this it would help me convert the
> school a lot easier.

Unfortunately, perl is set up to do that.  I don't think SO is ;-)
But I'd be really curious to see if anyone can come up with somethin!

> ps feel free to let me know if I'm smoking crack too :)

yes. ;-)

rc