[K12OSN] K12Linux EL6 Preliminary Feasibility Assessment

[Burke Almquist]

On May 20, 2011, at 9:57 PM, Jeff Siddall wrote:

> On 05/20/2011 09:05 PM, burke at thealmquists.net wrote:
>> I know I didn't expect you to ever get i586 clients working on EL5. I think anyone who wants that is better off using ubuntu/debian, or ltsp 4 on el5.
>> 
>> "Warren Togami Jr." <warren at togami.com> wrote:
>>> BAD, LIMITATIONS OF EL6 HARDWARE SUPPORT
>>> ========================================
>>> i686 with PAE minimum means the majority of existing LTSP client 
>>> hardware are unsupported.  Additionally, EL6 kernel lacks nbd.ko.
> 
> I am still a bit puzzled by this i586 stuff.  i586 hasn't worked on
> K12Linux since F11 and now we are four releases beyond that.
> 
> Telling people that they need to upgrade from an architecture that came
> out in 1993 (that's 18 years ago) to be able to run the latest versions
> of stuff doesn't seem that crazy.  Even low power embedded CPUs like the
> Via C3 are now a decade old and, at least in Fedora, the Geode is
> considered an i686.

I know the clients I use are 10+ year old Dell PIIIs. It if you are relying on used PCs, it shouldn't be too hard to find some old P4 or PIII based PCs.
The only concern would be 4-5? year old thin clients that had VIA or some other processors that didn't yet have i686 support.
I guess there's alway EL5 and LTSP 4.2 or Ubuntu/Debian for these.