Building GCC on Linux is much more fun than on MinGW... configure scripts fly by instead of slowly crawl by .

I just built 4.4 with similar options to 4.3 built by Ubuntu people (I'm guessing it's --enable-checking=release), and it is actually slightly faster! (compiling time, not resulting binary)

cyberfish@cyberfish-desktop:/data/cpp/Brainless$ time g++-4.4 -march=native -g -O3 -Wall Brainless.cpp -o bin/Release/Brainless -lboost_thread

real 0m5.773s
user 0m5.408s
sys 0m0.216s
cyberfish@cyberfish-desktop:/data/cpp/Brainless$ time g++ -march=native -g -O3 -Wall Brainless.cpp -o bin/Release/Brainless -lboost_thread

real 0m5.976s
user 0m5.520s
sys 0m0.280s
cyberfish@cyberfish-desktop:/data/cpp/Brainless$ time g++ -march=native -g -O0 -Wall Brainless.cpp -o bin/Release/Brainless -lboost_thread

real 0m2.145s
user 0m1.856s
sys 0m0.164s
cyberfish@cyberfish-desktop:/data/cpp/Brainless$ g++ -v
Using built-in specs.
Target: x86_64-linux-gnu
Configured with: ../src/configure -v --with-pkgversion='Ubuntu 4.3.2-1ubuntu12' --with-bugurl=file:///usr/share/doc/gcc-4.3/README.Bugs --enable-languages=c,c++,fortran,objc,obj-c++ --prefix=/usr --enable-shared --with-system-zlib --libexecdir=/usr/lib --without-included-gettext --enable-threads=posix --enable-nls --with-gxx-include-dir=/usr/include/c++/4.3 --program-suffix=-4.3 --enable-clocale=gnu --enable-libstdcxx-debug --enable-objc-gc --enable-mpfr --enable-checking=release --build=x86_64-linux-gnu --host=x86_64-linux-gnu --target=x86_64-linux-gnu
Thread model: posix
gcc version 4.3.2 (Ubuntu 4.3.2-1ubuntu12)
cyberfish@cyberfish-desktop:/data/cpp/Brainless$ g++-4.4 -v
Using built-in specs.
Target: x86_64-linux-gnu
Configured with: ../configure --enable-languages=c,c++ --prefix=/opt/gcc --with-system-zlib --without-included-gettext --disable-nls --enable-libstdcxx-debug --enable-checking=release --build=x86_64-linux-gnu
Thread model: posix
gcc version 4.4.0 20090407 (prerelease) (GCC)
Resulting binary is about as fast, though.