[Mageia-dev] i686 must be Pentium II ?

Sun Sep 26 09:24:20 CEST 2010

2010/9/26 André Machado <afmachado at dcemail.com>
+
+> > 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.
+>
+>
+> I don't want to deprive the fun of building a router or a firewall from an
+> old P133/64 with two ethernet cards, or some mediabox, but often you can't
+> (and sometimes you pay of energy power in a year much more than getting some
+> 30-50E linksys ARM linux based router. And when soemone try such kind of
+> attempts in the real world with your distro, will be very disappointed of
+> failures. That's why I in some way asked a survey of oldest hardware based
+> on own experiences.
+>
+> I fully agree, At "first world" countries, Like Europe ones or USA, people
+> can buy the most recet PCS, but at "Thrird world" countries - Like Brazil,
+> what is part of BRIC, or many Africa nations - this is very unacessible by
+> population, even with government programs, like Brazil's "Computador para
+> Todos" (computer for everyone) that sells low-cost PCs with inferior
+> hardware, often leftover stock lines earlier from the U.S. and Europe. In
+> many department shops here, for example, Core2Duo is sold as if it were
+> the last flavor of the moment.
+>
+> If, where you are, Pentium I - 4 and 32-bit platform is a museum thing, in
+> most World parts, is not. I know people that, nowadays, uses a Pentium 200
+> with 64MB RAM as main computer.
+>
+> Despite Mageia main target be current computers, we must think in these
+> people; 32-bit will not die anytime soon. Then: Do we need compile 32-bit
+> edition as i586 - and support Pentium and above, i686 - and support Pentium
+> Pro and above, or do a Mageia Lite edition?
+>
+> [PS: I did not break the thread this time, broke?]
+>
+>
+What I'm saying is that in the "real world", an hardware generation is born
+for a certain software generation. Outside this you can't, if programmers
+doesn't have paid a particular attention to memory consumption and
+performance. And currently they haven't.
+
+In mandriva 7.0-7.2 I was able to run vmware on a P133 with not 64 but 48MB
+of RAM, and there I was running another OS under which I was running a
+(TWAIN) software for page scanning for a Umax Page Office scanner, and that
+was the only software available for acquiring data from a parallel port. A
+bit slow but usable. The same using a modern distro on that old hardware is
+no longer possible. So the feeling of being compatible with older hardware
+is just apparent. This is true for even non-graphics applications. Try just
+with apache, postfix, spamassassin, or even a simple modem-bridge with the
+only things doing is having a modem connected to a serial port running a
+getty and pppd for dialup access (that's the smallest application which
+comes to my mind).
+
+So my point was that we were keeping flags holding the brakes for
+maintaining a compatibility which is just apparent. Current configuring
+tools are written in high level languages, like python, with a lot of other
+libraries, and they consumes a lot more memory than in the past. Even
+rendering the fonts consumes a lot more. xfs was even removed from standard
+installation.
+
+Being compatible and usable with legacy system like that is certainly
+possible, but not in the current way. On the software side is even worst
+(e.g. some software removed in favour of other newer having the same
+capability). Maybe there could be created a section called "Legacy" for such
+kind of things, with much more testing.
+
+Bye
+Giuseppe.
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