Fedora HW requirements

[Karsten Wade]

On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 10:46:43PM -0600, Dan Smith wrote:
> It's changed. I tried to install FC 7 or 8 on a machine running FC6
> once and found I could not do it. It is an issue since many folks like
> to use the same distro on all machines and keep older machines around
> as print servers, bastion hosts, data servers and such. I've got a
> couple ancient machines I'm rehabbing that I'll have to use a
> non-Fedora distro on because there's no way to lighten the kernel
> without a good bit of hand pruning to get it to run on the 256 megs of
> ram those two machines have.

This is one of the sources of the problem we have.  The release notes
do reflect the as-provided GA release, and wouldn't cover e.g. a spin
for lightweight machines.  But we cannot stop those people from
reading _these_ notes, and what would they say with their Fedora XFCE
spin designed to run on older hardware, and find >1 GiB CPU and RAM
requirements?

Here are some points to consider:

* How do we define a minimum set of hardware that is realistic?

* Who is doing that testing already and can tell us?

* Or is no one?  It's very telling that no one has bothered to update
  this content in a long time.  Fedora Docs relies upon the developer
  experts to tell us those numbers. David Woodhouse had helped keep
  the PowerPC side up to date for a long time, for example.

The most I'd feel comfortable doing is adding an admonition.

  Note

  Hardware specifications are bare minimum and may not work with
  standard Fedora

  It is possible to install Fedora in a very small footprint on slower
  hardware with less memory.  However, standard Fedora desktop and DVD
  installations are likely to require faster hardware with more
  memory.

  As a good rule, double or triple the bare minimum requirements on
  this page for a Fedora installation that uses a graphical
  environment or is otherwise not a custom Fedora Spin or Remix
  designed to run on older hardware.

Something like that. :)  Whatever we do, let's make the change on the
Beats page so we remember for next time.  If we get something good
enough, we can consider updating the current notes.

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Community Gardener
http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
AD0E0C41
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