[Mageia-dev] i686 must be Pentium II ?

Sun Sep 26 14:48:09 CEST 2010

Giuseppe Ghibò skrev 26.9.2010 14:59:
+> 2010/9/26 Thomas Backlund <tmb at iki.fi <mailto:tmb at iki.fi>>
+>
+>     Giuseppe Ghibò skrev 26.9.2010 02:09:
+>      >
+>
+>         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.
+>
+>
+>     You still miss the point that in Mageia community there are many
+>     users that find 30-50e a _lot_ of money, and we dont want to shut
+>     them out.
+>
+>
+> I'm not decreasing the value of the money, but rather I was pointing out
+> the false assumption that mageia (or the current inherited mandriva)
+> would work and would work FINE (or at all) on that hardware just because
+> it was using a compatible instruction set.
+
+Well, it depends of what you consider "FINE".
+I dont expect people using old hardware to try to get KDE or any 3d 
+stuff to work "FINE".
+
+But we have lightweight platforms such as lxde and xfce that both works 
+moderate/fast on a 200MHz+ platform with 128MB+ RAM.
+
+Then if you want it as a server, its even easier... you dont even need a 
+DE/GUI, as it's manageable through console/shell.
+
+
+> I'm not against this, but if
+> that we wanna support that kind of hardware there is MUCH MORE work to
+> do (I suggested a LEGACY section in the wiki, but seems it wasn't
+> caught) than just keeping the actual flags, because in that way if we
+> don't change then nobody will complain. Even the simple lzma payload of
+> rpm packages requires much more memory than in the past with gzip. I'm
+> not sure with current squashfs for the initial ram disks.
+>
+> I already cited there are other distro which maybe do a lot better this
+> job. In many countries there isn't even the broadband, dialup, nor the
+> electrical power for them. Right now you are almost assuming that a 10
+> years old instruction set is still a no go, and that our distro is
+> optimized like the one of the One Laptop Per Child Project.
+
+I know we dont optimize for OLPC.
+
+Yes, the instruction set is old, but there are many systems that are 
+older. and even if the hw is newer, it still does not enforce full i686 
+spec, as seen for example with either missing CMOV or another broken 
+register. Even Intel got it wrong with some series of the Pentium D wich 
+didn't work with i686 series builds...
+
+
+> Sadly it
+> isn't. But there is also a 2nd point: on old hardware it is still
+> possible to run old software and old distros: strange but true. Such old
+> software is still doing its dirty job. It's not that you get a trojan as
+> soon as you put the nose out the net. There are still ways of
+> configuring a distro on a LAN and trust in the people using the
+> terminals locally. Many schools still use them. In a 2 hours lesson at
+> school you can't wait half an our just to have your desktop booting...,
+
+It does not take half an hour if you use xfce/lxde.
+
+> the same if you plan an antispam server with latest antispam tools on a
+> server of that category (server that was doing it's dirty job with the
+> distro of 2 or 3 generations ago).
+>
+
+Oh, I know several servers out there running on i586 ~200Mhz that has no 
+problem what so ever keeping up with the spam/av filtering.
+
+> I also tried such old hardware, but there are much less bloated distro
+> and less bloated kernels (even non-linux ones) that do the job (or a
+> specific duty) on such hardware a lot better than ours.
+>
+
+Maybe so, but does that mean we should force them to _not_ use Mageia ?
+
+--
+Thomas
+