> 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.
Centos4 IS NOT a modern distro. It is a LTS started in 2005 and so it maintains 2005's original skeleton of kernel, gcc, glibc and X. That's FIVE years old. As example MDV 2007.1, which is 3 years old, was still very usable and responsive on my P4/ATI (maybe not as much as stable with 3D acceleration), but 2010.0 ISN'T.
> 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.
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
Very interesting, but will such "industrial use" will be target for Mageia (BTW, certainly socket 775 CPU will support SSE and SSE2...)? If they have an ISA slot, I guess is for maintaning the compatibility with some old fancy (and maybe custom) card, certainly not for an ISA ethernet card that can be easily replaced with a cheap PCI one or the one on board.
> 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.
Not exactly. I'm not talking in just using -march=<something> but in also pushing -mfpmath=sse -msse (and maybe -msse2) , which should be much more than JUST 1-2% (1-2% is usually the benchmark tolerance)...Indeed the original idea was of having real .i586, .k6, .k7.rpm, .viac3, .viac7.rpm RPM packages, at least for the core ones: some time ago, when I was fighting with having a non-crashing kernel for the dedibox, I had started adding such "dialects" to the RPM macros (but problems were on the glibc package), but being realistic I think it's a lot of work and there aren't the resources, so a choice of the default flags should be done.
Bye
Giuseppe.