On Sat, Apr 26, 2003 at 02:56:13AM -0500, Chris Cheney wrote: > 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.
That's really not so relevant, even if correct. If they already have a shitload of Pentiums which will do the job, why force them to buy anything newer? > 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. Heh. I once (no, twice) installed on a 486-50 with 4MB of RAM... :-P I can't remember whether that was slink, or whether I got hold of slink after being suitably impressed with the results (had to leave dselect running^Wthrashing for round about 36 hours, I think, for the initial install ;) ). That's actually what got me started moving from slackware to Debian... Anyway, back to the point. > Machines old enough to be before i686 are probably also old > enough to be barely usable as a desktop, I think you'll find they'll do just fine in all sorts of roles. Perhaps not as a whizzy desktop running the latest greatest KDE or Gnome (resisting the temptation, see ;) ), but certainly running X (although I must admit XFree >= 4 is a real memory hog compared to previous versions). > What are the theoretical binary-only > apps that these desktops would be using, whizbang 3d games, multimedia > players, or something else? Whizbang 3d games and multimedia players are not the only things that people write in C++. > 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...) See, I think this is where you're just fundamentally mistaken. > In Dec 1994 I got my P90 with the biggest available ide hard drive > which was 500MB. :-P No it wasn't. You must have been shopping in the wrong places. I got my 486DX66 with a 504MB drive in mid '93 and had the option of a bigger one (~1G I think, but can't remember exactly)... > Compare that size to what sid currently requires for > various installs: > > sid chroot install - 160MB > sid standard install - 249MB Perfectly fine. I think I'll have to finish the install on this P200MMX I have sitting under my desk here just to see how big it does end up. > 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... Whilst I don't see that the "standard desktops" are at all essential to a productive setup, I will agree that it is a shame how large the standard installs are getting. I think there will come a point where it is more useful to have a separate distribution or meta-distribution for older systems (with a sensible-sized libc, for example) than to stick with a "one size fits all" approach. I just don't think that with the quantity of Pentium-class machines out there that we've got to that point just yet. Cheers, Nick -- Nick Phillips -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Give him an evasive answer.
