[RULE] Linuxjournal article, continued

[Richard Kweskin]

On Thu, 19 May 2005 15:51:32 +0100
Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:

several snips were made

> On 5/19/05, M. Fioretti <mfioretti> wrote:
>
several snips were made 
> > 
> > *if* I understand the question, the answer is "not more than if I were
> > running standard FC3 on an officially supported machine". That's the
> > beauty of it: on a RULE machine you'd have no power to compile kernels
> > by yourself anyway, so you would depend from binary updates coming
> > from outside. Outside here means "you do it yourself on some more
> > powerful HW, spending a lot of time" or "you use the same stuff of a
> > lot of other people, stuff that is supported and fixed often, so
> > you're better off"
> 
> OK. As I understand it, what he's getting at is this - and please
> correct me if my understanding is wrong.
> 
>  - The only bits of Fedora which are CPU-specific are the kernels,
> which in some cases can be optimised for specific CPU architectures
> and will not run on 486 or Pentium-1 level kit. RULE provides
> custom-compiled with generic i486 optimisations.
> (Is that right?)

In my limited experience Fedora 3's stock kernel seems to run on P1.

> - This being so, all the actual software packages are compiled with
> generic i486 optimisations and will run happily on anything?
>  - So if you install Fedora updates on the machine, they will *all*
> just run, without exception?
>

As Marco wrote, it is essential that the user does not choose heavy duty software or expect resource hungry websites to run on older hardware. Within such reasonable limits it seems that updates will just run, although unfortunately this can only remain unproven until a negative example rears its ugly head.  :((

> What Don is concerned about is this scenario. You install a RULE
> system with a mix of components, including some compiled by RULE for
> 486. Then you update it using Fedora tools and you get something
> included in that update which is compiled for i686 and won't run on a
> 486. Result, broken system.
>

I confess to not being aware of components compiled by RULE for Fedora 3 other than k-drive and certain software which had not originally appeared in the stock Fedora. Thus there will be no updates that would break these. Updates, of course will be available, as with all free software, but will already be geared toward low powered systems or only available in a form that requires compiling, hence one escapes the issue.

> Is this possible?
> 
> [Now Don...] 
> Are you saying that all the Fedora components are still happy on
> 486-level kit, or at least P1?
>

I stated above that my limited experience shows P1 to be within Fedora 3's scope.

> What I think Don's saying is that he won't promote a distro by giving
> it coverage in the mag if it cannot be kept 100% up-to-date with
> security patches etc. Once they're online, old machines are just as
> vulnerable to exploits as the latest screaming dual-core Athlon64
> monster.
>

Liam, RULE does not produce a distro. It simply chooses to use a smaller number of Fedora packages, all of which are stock Fedora. The installer, Slinky, is the one RULE made component that a RULE user must use.

The end result is that a RULE user can follow any advice or update from the Fedora community that is appropriate to the system.

Richard

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