Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2210 mails)

[Per Jessen <per@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Richard Creighton wrote:

> It is the collection of support software that becomes the personality
> of the distribution and it is also the reason our old 486 machines
> won't run anymore.  

Uh, I'm not sure I can quite follow you.  If the openSUSE project built
the distro for the 386 instruction set, the old 486 machines would
still work fine.  

> It is these neat packages of music, graphics, editors and what-not,
> that depend on instructions that the poor old 486 processor simply has
> no concept of. 

If there is code containing 586 or 686 specific instructions, it
obviously won't work on anything that does not have support for those. 
However, regular C code can be compiled not to use such instructions.

> So while Linux itself can be compiled to run in a mode that is
> compatible with the old box, it is unlikely the rest of any modern
> distro will do so as well. 

Actually, I think it's quite likely that openSUSE could.

> I challange a user of VISTA or even XP to take its' kernel and boot on
> a 486...never mind all its bells and whistles, just the
> kernel....

I have a suspicion you might be surprised.  There's probably still some
OS2 stuff lurking around in Vista. 



/Per Jessen, Zürich

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