[plug] need to upgrade? -was Re: [plug] kmail and the gigasecond bug

[Bret Busby]

On Sun, 09 Sep 2001, Steve Vertigan wrote:
> Bret Busby wrote:
> 
> > This Cyrix 6x86 is reated as being equivalent to about a pentium 75/90. It is a
> > fair bit less than a P200.
> 
> Are you sure it's a 6x86?  CPUs aren't my strong point but my BSD box is
> a cyrix 5x86 which is supposed to be about equivalent to a pentium 100. 
> It's seems strange a 6x86 would be less powerful.

The 586 was supposed to be the equivalent of a 486; the 6x86 was supposed to be
the equivalent of a pentium. However, I have subsequently found that, while the
6x86 is supposed to be the equivalent of a pentium in processing power, it uses
only the 486 instruction set.

> 
> > Also, from memory, this CPU is supposed to use the 486 instruction set.
> 
> That's certainly the case with my cyrix 586.  Compiling things for 586
> (pentium) will lead to problems with it.  As someone else pointed out
> Mandrake is optimised for 586 out of the box so it would lead to
> problems if your processor doesn't support that.
> 
> > We also have RH 6.2 installed on a 486 with 16MB RAM; one of the nodes of our
> > LAN. we use two Cyrix 6x86's in our LAN. Does RH 7.x run on a 486? Does it run,
> > with X-Windows, in 16MB RAM? Would your Mandrake 7.2 run on a 486 with 16MB
> > RAM? Is Mandrake 7.2 any more recent than RH6.2?
> 
> The software included with a Mandrake release is generally equivalent to
> or newer than the software included with the equivalent redhat version
> number due to Mandrake originally being a redhat derivative although now
> they tend to push the enveloope more than redhat with things like kde
> and gnome.  So a machine that can run Mandrake 7.2 will obviously run
> redhat 7.2.  As per Redhat running on 16 Mb RAM I don't use Redhat so if
> you want it's hardware requirements I suggest looking at their website.
> The post I replied to said you had 64 MB so I'm not sure why you're even
> talking about 16 MB. 
> 

As I said above, we have a 486 with 16MB RAM. As I said in a subsequent posting,
the 486 is the only PC that we could spare to trial a new(er) distribution.
Simple.

Bret Busby
..........