Dropping pre-i686 from the archive

[Peter Garrett]

On Wed, 11 Jan 2006 16:26:56 +0100
Marco Cabizza <mc at newglobal.it> wrote:

> > Ubuntu should keep the perspective that it is for everyone, not just
> > people who can afford the luxury of powerful hardware.
> 
> i686 is not a luxury, as of Jan 2006. Honestly none of my friends have a
> non-i686 CPU (and I'm only a student, therefore I can't afford MASSIVE
> machines).

You forget that in many parts of the world, what you regard as affordable,
isn't. And please remember that even "old" pentiums or even 486 machines
are quite capable of many tasks - after all, they are many times more
powerful than the mainframes I used as a university student in the 1970s...
> 
> I don't think GNOME is the best choice for retrocomputing (I'm a power
> GNOME FANATIC, though), if we want to expand the "ubuntu is for
> everyone" concept. Try running a default desktop setup on a 96 or 97
> machine, is it smooth?

As Oliver has pointed out, the function of the old machines is to act as
thin clients, not to run GNOME etc themselves.
> 
> I guess not, probably because I had a similar experience with machines
> that were as old as Windows 2000, or perhaps one year younger. Having a
> smooth setup without removing tons of packages was pure mythology.

No-one suggests that old pentiums with 32 or 64 MB RAM can run GNOME well
- it's worth pointing out though, that until recently one of my machines
was a P200 MMX 64MB RAM running Breezy with fluxbox quite successfully
using light apps like emelfm, sylpheed and abiword etc It even played
music well using either cplay or alsaplayer, and the Gimp was usable for
simple image manipulations. It's a question of knowing what to use and how
to set it up, that's all.

Peter

-- Unix is hard to learn. The process of learning it is one of multiple
small epiphanies. -- Neal Stephenson