Dropping i386 non-PAE as a supported kernel flavour in Precise Pangolin

[Barry Warsaw]

On Nov 10, 2011, at 06:08 PM, Dotan Cohen wrote:

>Most people that I know are using 3-5 year old hardware, and I would
>say that the 5-8 year hardware is more common than 0-3 year old
>hardware. Maybe we have less of a wasteful culture than those who
>replace their entire desktops every <5 years, but even in instances
>where a user _does_ replace his hardware so often, what becomes of
>that hardware? I'll tell you: it becomes some relative's computer. Or
>some neighbour's.

I've used this fact very effectively to migrate people to Ubuntu.  Many times,
they have an older computer that just starts dogging under Windows, maybe
because of bloatware, malware, or whatever.  Instead of spending $$$ on a new
computer, I'll give them a CD and tell them to give Ubuntu a try.  I've had
more than one friend/relative become very happy Ubuntu users because it
breathed new life into old hardware.  How awesome is it that you just saved a
friend several hundred to a thousand dollars *and* stealthily gave them some
freedom too?

(The servers in my closet are both at least a decade old, and happily run
10.04 LTS.  I hope to be able to upgrade them to 12.04 LTS.)

If you do end up dropping non-PAE, I think you need to do two important
things:

* Provide a very easy way for folks to determine whether their hardware is
  affected or not.
* Absolutely, positively, refuse to begin to upgrade such machines.  There's
  nothing worse than bricking their working hardware.

I'll note with a little sadness my inability to upgrade my first gen MacBook
Pro 1,1 to Lion because it doesn't support the Core Duo chip in that old
machine.  Hey wait, I know a good free operating system that *does* run on it!

-Barry