Fedora 18 Beta to slip by two weeks, Beta release date is now Nov 27

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2012-11-10 at 06:40 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

> > Look, I like a good argument as much as anyone else, but this is
> > ludicrous. Are you just replying to me for the sake of scoring a point?

> No. I feel Fedora is going down the drain, with the installer's demands 
> and Fedora's upgrade mechanisms being a major factor contributing to this.

BTW, here's an interesting note on the '9 years' angle.

So we know a mid-high end system in 2003 had 512MB of RAM. We know that
RHL in 2003 required 128MB of RAM for graphical installation. Right now
- 9 years later - we know that our current stable Fedora requires 512MB;
in other words, it can still install to that mid-high end system from
2003 (a Pentium 4 with 512MB of RAM) and probably run fine, using say
LXDE.

Now let's rewind time to 2003. Our current stable Red Hat Linux release,
RHL 9, requires 128MB of RAM for graphical installation. Can it install
on a mid-high end system from 9 years ago, 1994?

It's a bit hard to find references, but a post at
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=11638 suggests
the following specs for a 'Midrange 1994' system:

40MHz Intel 486DX2
8MB RAM (whatever type was used back then)
500MB hard drive
1MB SVGA-capable graphics card
3.5" floppy drive (although I'll probably cheat and add a CD-ROM drive)
Windows 3.11

That more or less accords with my memory. I recall that when Doom came
out, which was in 1993, my father had recently purchased a very high-end
system, which was a 33MHz 486DX with a whopping 16MB of RAM; I'm fairly
sure I recall that a more standard config at that time was 4MB. So let's
be generous and say that a mid-high end config in 1994 was 16MB of RAM.

So could our 2003 stable release, Red Hat Linux 9, install on a system
from nine years previously? It could not. It required eight times more
memory than a nine year old system had.

So right now, we are doing substantially *better* at supporting old
systems than we were in 2003.

How's that?
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net