Ubuntu on a 486?

[Adriano Varoli Piazza]

On 12/13/06, Peter Garrett <peter.garrett at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
> On Wed, 13 Dec 2006 06:38:28 +0100
> "Adriano Varoli Piazza" <moranar at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > running Linux on a 486 is all
> > well and good, but not necessarily the objective Ubuntu has. I'd
> > rather not dilute Ubuntu to gain something that runs everywhere.
>
> LTSP with Edubuntu, for example - using old boxes as thin clients etc.

Perfect, but Edubuntu isn't Ubuntu, and their devs get paid
accordingly (see my other mail, I don't mean to imply this is good,
wrong or whatever, just that it is (or might be, if I'm not getting
things wrong)).

> To quote Oliver Grawert ( who is invoved in Edubuntu development and said
> this earlier in the thread, in case you didn't see it) in answer to:
>
> > Is anyone here running Ubuntu on a 486?  Like, anything the -generic
> > kernel can't run on?  (-386 is a 486 kernel)
>
> <quote>
> yes, huge amounts of LTSP users, mediacenter PC users or people that run
> ubuntu based routers/firewalls on small HW ...

"Huge" compared to what? Compared to the number of people who run
Ubuntu for "Desktop" purposes?

> there are many new boards that still require at least 486 comaptibility
> in the kernel ...
>
> </quote>

That still doesn't change a bit of the Ubuntu objectives. If Ubuntu is
useful for them, more power to 'em, but I wouldn't want a worse distro
on my desktop "just" because some users want it to work on low-end HW
it wasn't advertised for.

Canonical has stated it wants Ubuntu to be the best distro on the
desktop. I installed it for this reason. It provides a good Linux
server, too, with some restrictions: As of now, LTS won't even run on
my server (62 MB RAM are the guilty party here). Do you see me
protesting? No, I installed Sarge on it. The right tool for the right
job, or something like that (Slack or Vector Linux would have sufficed
too, but frankly, I don't have the time right now to learn another
distro).

-- 
Adriano Varoli Piazza
The Inside Out: http://moranar.com.ar
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