post install very slooow

[John Reiser]

> I suspect the use case is 'test every version of OS/distro that comes
> down the pipe'... if that's your goal, your choices are:
> 
> 1) virt
> 2) LVM (note: Linux only)
> 3) pile'o'partitions
> 
> For those that can't do #2, and don't feel like doing #1...

Yes.  Customers want to do _their own_ work;
your product had better "just work" in their environment.
Each environment has different bugs and UI, which your product
must tolerate.  Virtualization still is not user-equivalent
to real hardware.

For a while it looked like i686 systems might die out,
but then netbooks appeared with Intel Atom CPU and 1GB RAM;
running 32-bit software made some sense again.  [So boot i686 with
"mem=1023m" on the kernel command line to experience 1GB RAM.]

If you link a program against glibc-2.x, then for w < x
the program might fail to run with glibc-2.w.
In the worst case you must link at least one version
on the oldest system that you support.
[And keep that original VGA card running, because
the X11 drivers in the old systems might not support
today's hardware.]

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