Re: Debian and Pentium 4

["Hall Stevenson" <hallstevenson@mindspring.com>]

> One of our profs bought a Dell 8100 Pentium 4 for
> home use and he wants to install Linux on it.  He
> would like to install Debian, but he says that Debian
> doesn't support the Pentium 4 yet.  Is this true?

I think it will work just fine. The problem occurs when a program (or
the kernel) tries to determine what CPU is installed). On RedHat,
Mandrake, and others, during initial install, they try to find out what
CPU in there and install a "custom" kernel, optimized for that CPU vs
just using the plain, compiled for i386 CPUs.

As long as Debian's kernel is not "optimized" for a particular CPU,
he'll be okay.

Regards
Hall