On Sat, Apr 26, 2003 at 06:38:34PM +1200, Nick Phillips wrote: > It may be relatively cheap and easy for *you* to buy a two-year-old > system, but I don't believe that in this case you are representative > of nearly enough of our users to be a useful example.
I also find it hard to believe that the majority of our users do not have or can not purchase a system that is less than 7 years old. Being that is how old the i686 sub-arch is... I once attempted to install Debian 2.1 on a Pentium 90, it took many hours and was a pita to say the least. Machines old enough to be before i686 are probably also old enough to be barely usable as a desktop, especially since ram prices back then were still quite high (~ $40/MB iirc), and disk sizes quite small (2GB HD was $300 in 1996). What are the theoretical binary-only apps that these desktops would be using, whizbang 3d games, multimedia players, or something else? A reduced size 386-586 arch wouldn't be bad for a server, which imho is about all machines that old are really good for anyway. (And no Manoj I am not attempting to troll with this post...) In Dec 1994 I got my P90 with the biggest available ide hard drive which was 500MB. Compare that size to what sid currently requires for various installs: sid chroot install - 160MB sid standard install - 249MB sid standard + gnome install - 623MB sid standard + kde install - 677MB The point being Debian sid with only one of the standard desktops (with no extra packages and no swap space) is already bigger than most machines from 1995 and older can support unmodified anyway... Chris
