[Rule-list] About RH 8 not supporting 486

[Martin Stricker]

Most of my points have already been made, I agree with nearly everything
Marco and Michael said.

Michael Fratoni wrote:

> On Monday 21 October 2002 06:17 pm, Marco Fioretti wrote:

> > Any feedback is ... due, more than welcome, isn't it?
> > (even because the final form of the text below will almost *have*
> > to end up on the web site as the "official" position of the
> > project, right?)
> 
> It should be posted on the web site, I couldn't agree more.

Yes, please put it up prominently soon!

> I agree, from Red Hat's position, it makes sense to remove the i386
> kernel. They have made it clear they don't support the i386 and i486
> hardware. I don't agree with the fact that the release notes make no
> mention of the i386 kernel being removed.

Exactly. Especially since the necessary space is free, they would just
have had to shuffle RPMs a bit...

> > What should Red Hat users do?
> >
> >         Nothing, if they are satisfied with the performances of
> >         their box.
> 
> I disagree.
> I think Red hat users should request the inclusion of an i386 kernel,
> regardless of what kernel they need to use on their own machines.

I will continue to complain as well.

> >       2) Judging from the number of list members(~100) and from the
> >          average time we talk on this list we still have not enough
> >          mass/average competence/free time/whatever to create and
> >          above all maintain a whole distro from scratch (if I'm
> >          wrong, just tell me, and I'd be really happy!)
> 
> While we could, in theory, repackage the packages we need and
> distribute a mini distro, there are some significant issues that
> would need to be resolved. Just for an easy one off the top of my
> head, bandwidth. Who's going to host it, and where?

savannah.gnu.org ;=D Or we move to SourceForge. Or find an university
that helps us out - one of our targets is schools and universities... I
don't think we'll have much difficulty hosting it, the difficulty I see
is how can people in the poor countries download it? I'm behind a modem
line myself, paid by the minute. Downloading a full 650 MB ISO image
would take *at least* two days and would cost me... *yipe!* So
distribution is a huge concern! 

> >       4) **Personally**, I will continue to work for RULE on RH
> >          because I have no spare HW, and because I have to use only
> >          RH Linux in my paid job, and hope that Michael will keep
> >          miniconda and slinky current, since without them RH on old
> >          HW is impossible from the beginning. Another important
> >          reason to stay with RH (IMHO) is the one pointed out by
> >          Colin, i.e. to remember to an important corporation that
> >          there are people who cannot afford the full thing, and
> >          that RH should at the very least not make their life
> >          deliberately harder.
> 
> I'm in agreement. I use Red Hat, and have since the 5.1 release. I'm
> familiar with and like the product. I'll continue to support them
> where possible.

Me, too. My first Red Hat Linux was 4.0, I think.Downloaded and burnt at
university...

> >       6) Summarizing, I highly recommend that, at least for the
> >          short/medium term, we keep RH as the base distro: again,
> >          for very pragmatical reasons (old Winston used to say
> >          "slowly but surely"), not to start yet another
> >          distro war on what is a side issue, after all
> 
> Our installers, as mentioned earlier, are installers for Red Hat
> linux. As long as an official i386 kernel is available, this remains
> true. The problem I see, is that should an official kernel not be
> available, we can't make that claim.

Not necessarily. Think about the XFS-enabled installer ISO (about 50 MB)
done by SGI! I don't know the exact wording, but I'm sure "Red Hat
Linux" is mentioned.

> >       8) Somebody mentioned the possible need to just recompile all
> >          RPMs for i386: much ligther than creating a new distro,
> >          but fully useful only after sorting out dependencies and
> >          configuration as already explained. In the meantime, don't
> >          forget it, and offer to the list a script to do it
> >          automatically from a base RH install with gcc only, and
> >          stock source CDs...
> 
> Assuming a compatible kernel to get the machine running, recompiling
> from source is a possibility. However, I did some testing on a P-166,
> and did a kernel compile in 8M of RAM. After 24 hours, I killed the
> process so I could use the box for further install testing. :)

You can recompile the current kernel on an P-166-MMX, I did it on this
very machine. Just be sure to throw out *everything* you do not really
need, and plan non-computer activities for a day. ;-))

> Recompiling and distributing the binaries seems more plausible,
> however, there is still the bandwidth/hosting (Or other distribution
> method) issue to contend with.
> 
> However, just as a test, I think I am going to put together a
> "slinky" based i386 RULE-linux CD. ;)

Personally, I would like to have a RULE ISO. It could contain some other
useful stuff (and thus make RULE more known): SGI said they won't
provide an ISO for Red Hat Linux 8.0, so you can not use XFS filesystems
at install time, nor for your / directory. The RULE CD could fit in here
very nicely!

While I would love to learn how to build a distro from scratch, I don't
think we need yet another Linux distribution, and I do not have the
necessary time for it.

Best regards,
Martin Stricker
-- 
Homepage: http://www.martin-stricker.de/
Linux Migration Project: http://www.linux-migration.org/
Red Hat Linux 7.3 for low memory: http://www.rule-project.org/
Registered Linux user #210635: http://counter.li.org/


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