[Mageia-dev] i686 must be Pentium II ?

Tux99 tux99-mga at uridium.org
Sun Sep 26 00:12:54 CEST 2010


On Sat, 25 Sep 2010, Giuseppe Ghibò wrote:
>
> 2010/9/25 Tux99 <tux99-mga at uridium.org>
> 
> Again, you are missing the point, these machines are not desktop PCs
> > running a GUI, any modern Linux distro still runs perfectly fine with
> > 64-128MB and 10-15 year old cpus when used for many headless purposes.
> >
> 
> For instance? Apart DSL which distro can you start the installer with 64MB
> memory only (use 1GB swap?)? Were you able to install the 2010.1?

Centos 4 installs and runs perfectly fine on a Pentium II 350Mhz with 
128MB RAM, I know it because I installed such a box for a friend as home 
server running 24/7 (with DNS server, apache and some other stuff).
I didn't try Mandriva since it lacks long term support.

> Common where? There are schools and universities are dismitting hardware
> like with P4/2.4Ghz and 512MB RAM for whatever use (either server or
> desktop). And even older hardware no-ROHS, which should be dismantled
> carefully.

You are seeing everything from a limited european POV, the P4 you say is 
being thrown away here is a top-end system in some other countries.
Mageia is supposed to be for the whole world, not just EU/US/BRICs.

With regards to ISA cards, you can even still buy brand new modern mobos 
with ISA slots right here in Europe, they are still common for 
industrial uses:
http://www.spectra.de/produkte/114184/web/spectra/Datenblatt-PMB-601LF.pdf?CFID=92074854-8638-47f6-a589-6517cde18fb1&CFTOKEN=0

> I'm not speaking about exclusion but about including or optimizing for arch
> and hardware that NOBODY will use anymore, because can't.

The optimization you are talking about (which will increase 
performance by a few percentage points at most, not noticeable at all 
in practice) means that the distro will be unusable for others.



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