Changing the default 32-bit x86 arch for Fedora 12

[Dan Williams]

On Mon, 2009-06-15 at 22:56 -0500, Matt Domsch wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 06:01:14PM -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > Because that's significantly less of our userbase. I'd love to have
> > harder numbers, but we're still talking about a set of CPUs that
> > (outside of corner cases like the Geode and C3) ceased production
> > anywhere from 4 (Athlon) to 6 (P3) to 10 (P2) years ago.
> 
> production, but not support.  People buying these did expect software
> to exist and run on them for more than 4+ years.
> 
> My little old Latitude C400 works great as a relatively low power
> firewall/router/printserver/torrent seed/bastion host.

I've got one of those too, and it's certainly not usable enough for
*desktop* work.  Just a data point.  Firefox makes it cry.  Whether
that's due to small caches, lack of memory (mine has 512MB), or the i830
video driver still having major acceleration issues, I don't know.

Can't say anything about it's usage as a headless machine though.

Dan

> $ cat /proc/cpuinfo
> processor   : 0
> vendor_id   : GenuineIntel
> cpu family  : 6
> model	      : 11
> model name    : Intel(R) Pentium(R) III Mobile CPU      1200MHz
> stepping      : 1
> cpu MHz		: 798.000
> cache size	: 512 KB
> fdiv_bug	: no
> hlt_bug		  : no
> f00f_bug	  : no
> coma_bug	  : no
> fpu		    : yes
> fpu_exception	    : yes
> cpuid level	    : 2
> wp		    : yes
> flags		      : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse up
> bogomips : 1594.67
> clflush size	: 32
> power management:
> 
> BIOS Information
>         Vendor: Dell Computer Corporation
>         Release Date: 03/01/2004
> 
> with a BIOS a little over 5 years old.  Is it long in the tooth?  sure.  Is it still very functional?  you bet.
> 
> I wouldn't go so far as to require sse2 in such a move.
> 
> -- 
> Matt Domsch
> Technology Strategist, Dell Office of the CTO
> linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux
>