i586 kernel [was Re: Module symbol versions in installer kernel]

Stan Bubrouski stan at ccs.neu.edu
Sat May 15 19:04:33 UTC 2004


On Sat, 2004-05-15 at 14:28, Matthew Miller wrote:
> Not to doubt you, but what does "plenty of them" mean? Fedora won't even
> install with 32MB, and by the time more RAM than that was common, so were
> newer CPUs, if I remember right.
> 

Not to doubt you, but there are plenty of people using their old 586's
for everything from local ftp servers to gateways, etc... there are lots
of uses for i586's that don't need X.

> I'm very sympathetic to making Linux run on older hardware, but Fedora is
> already pretty unfriendly to those systems as is. Why not just make the

How so? A stripped down install is still more powerful than a palm :)

> Pentium Pro the minimum for FC3? That covers us all the way to back to 1995
> (well, okay, 1998, since the PPro never really caught on and there were all
> those MMX P5s). Other distros -- perhaps even a tailored Fedora branch --
> can cover before that.
> 

A simple stripped down install of fedora works on 586 CPUs, -X and the
flashy crap and you got a nice small server.  The fact of the matter is
people still use them.  This reminds me of running X on my p166, boy
those were trying times ;-)

-sb

> 
> -- 
> Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
> Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>
> 





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