i486 FC3

[Jerone Young]

There is no reason why you would need this. Fedora can run on old hardware now.

i486 is just too old. Because hardware is so cheap now a day I don't
believe anyone is going to want o waste their time with old hardware.
While Linux techincally can run on it (you will need to recompile the
FC kernel for i486, currently the default kernel has P5 optimizations,
so it will boot), most will tell you take $100 and get a machine that
is 1000x better. No reason to squander on the past that is just sooooo
slow and so many problems (can you say IRQ conflicts, DMA settings
.... oh soo many painful nights) , compared to the cheap hardware of
today. The biggest problem is device drivers for older hardware. It's
either works great now, or not there, or unmaintained and not no a
good state. If your hadware falls in the latter two, then you need to
hit LKML and start writting some device drivers. Having to deal with
hardware pre Plug&Play is a headache no one whoould ever want to deal
with again.

Now don't get me wrong, a lot that our old stuff is going to poorer
countries. Where they are using it as new. Fedora Core 3 runs on
anything Pentium class and up now. I can tell you though that running
KDE or Gnome on a Pentium 200 with 128mb  Ram is pure torture (never
had a chance to try Xfce though, I threw those boxes out). Only thing 
they are good for now for basic server side services stuff (apache ,
samba, etc) nowaday.



On Thu, 25 Nov 2004 18:18:11 +0100, Hans de Goede <j.w.r.degoede at hhs.nl> wrote:
> Although I don't have an i486 anymore I'm interested in getting FC3 to
> run ok on older hardware, if there are more of us maybe we can spin of
> an fc3 on old hw project?
> 
> This is not meant to be a fork, but to generate ideas / patches for fcX
> proper which will enable it to run on older HW.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Hans
> 
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