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Re: next debian stable ?



On Thu, 2003-05-01 at 06:34, Paul Johnson wrote:
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> On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 02:14:20PM -0400, Kevin McKinley wrote:
> > I hope Sarge includes an option to install with 2.2 kernels, for those with
> > older, slower, memory-poor hardware.
> 
> That might not be the case.  There's been rumors the last few days
> that Debian may pull i386 in favor of i486 thanks to GCC, Debian
> Weekly News isn't denying it, either.  Hope nobody was looking on
> putting sarge on an i80386.
> http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/17/
> 
> So what if Sarge doesn't have a 2.2 install option?  Isn't that why we
> have this?  Up until woody came out, the website still had
> installation images for bo...
> http://www.debian.org/distrib/archive
> 
> - -- 

Back in the mid-80s of another millenium, AT&T marketed an Olivetti
designed and built Intel 8088 system (AT&T 6300) with a choice of o/s
(as was theoretically common back then): CP/M, MS-DOS, and Unix(TM). Not
Xenix, but an actual port of Unix.

That all said, I personally would discourage people trying to do much
more than console and household gateway/firewall functions on an i386
anymore - I remember when they were great steps forward compared to the
i286 (I ran an i386DX/22 MHz box for several years with general comfort,
until I started using an i486DX/33 MHz at home and was getting 15 times
the performance,) but it was over a decade ago that they dropped off the
technology block as a general use computing processor. Maybe if some
people desperately yearn to maintain using such machines, there would be
justification for them to look at forking an at least limited
distribution still compiling against libraries that would work on it,
and implementing any bug and security fixes as appropriate. But notice I
say "they" and "them" - I don't feel that it is the responsibility of
Debian to support older processors eternally, given the limitations of
its resources and volunteer nature.
-- 
Mark L. Kahnt, FLMI/M, ALHC, HIA, AIAA, ACS, MHP
ML Kahnt New Markets Consulting
Tel: (613) 531-8684 / (613) 539-0935
Email: kahnt@hosehead.dyndns.org

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