[plug] Free CD linux - any good ?

[Peter Wright]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 03:30:20AM +0000, Mike wrote:
> TAh Ari,
> 
> It is an AMD DX4/133 ie 33Mhz Bus, 4x clocked, though 40Mhz bus, (3.3V)
[ snip ]

Interesting...

> What I was really wondering about is - will the 486 architecture be OK -
> is there a 'switch' conditional setup/compile to exclude pentium class
> inst ?

As others have stated, no, there isn't. Mandrake is one of those distros
that have decided to specifically say "stuff the low end" and go all out
with a distro aimed at higher end PCs. And I must say they do it very well.

But Mandrake will just flat out not run on 386 or 486 machines. Every
binary in the distro (well, every C/C++ app for which they have the source)
has been compiled with Pentium-enhancements. Which theoretically makes them
slightly (up to 30% I think) faster.

BTW, I had a quick look on the Mandrake site (www.mandrake.com), trying to
find an FAQ or something that might have info on this, but couldn't. Oh,
hang on a tick... well, at http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/ffaq.php3 they
have a few links to things that they call FAQs, but frankly they're a bit
of an embarrassment. Absolutely pissweak excuses for FAQs.

Hmmm, beginning to wonder if Mandrake _are_ still a pentium-only distro. I
haven't seen it mentioned (or even alluded to) _anywhere_ in the docs I've
looked through so far - most notably not in the "supported hardware"
section of the user guide:
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/doc/72/en/user.html/install-hardware.html

> Rgds
> Mike

Ah, just try one of the usual suspects. Debian. Redhat. Slackware. Debian.
Did I suggest Debian? :-)

Pete.
-- 
http://cygnus.uwa.edu.au/~pete/

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