Re: Why are there only i686 and i586 Version of glibc and kernel? -- i386 is still around

[Per Bjornsson <perbj stanford edu>]

Matthew Miller wrote:

> I know. But a more focused low-horsepower (relatively speaking) version of
> Fedora could be even better for those systems. I'd _love_ a version of
> Fedora that'd run nicely on my Pentium 75 32MB Libretto 50CT -- but I don't
> see the point in forcing the main Fedora Core distro to squeeze on there.

Oh well. To me it sounds like there's a pretty big difference between 
your 75 MHz Pentium classic and my girlfriend's 550 MHz K6-2 (or 
possibly 450 MHz, I can't remember, but K6 versions did go up to 550 MHz 
in any case). Those are still (marginally) reasonable desktop machines, 
even with modern desktops. (OpenOffice is a bit of a hog to start, but 
e.g. Abiword and Gnumeric are fine. Web browsing with Firefox is fine, 
apart from slightly annoying startup times; same goes for Evolution for 
e-mail.) If Fedora is going to dump this machine class already I'd love 
to see that based on some benchmarking demonstrating that there is a 
significant gain for newer machines. I think that it's a big sacrifice 
to make, way too big if it's made without serious benchmarking and 
consideration.

Cheers,
Per

--
Per Bjornsson <perbj at stanford dot edu>
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University