On Fri, 20 Jun 2003 17:20:13 +0200, Mathieu Roy wrote: > If so, are you kidding? The Pentium classic (i586) was still available > in 1997.
It is still available even today. Not sure where to get a mainboard for this beast, but just a week ago I saw it on a price list. > I know a lot of person who use a Pentium classic as mini-server, with is > really enough to run a local network. > > Also P MMX seems meaningless to me. MMX was, I think, introduced in > Pentium Pro (which is still a i586 according to uname) Really? Seems wrong to me. > and nowadays computers still got MMX (so what is the meaning of P MMX? > PPro? PII? PIII? PIV?). MMX was introduced with the Pentium/MMX (P55C) processor. That's a Pentium (i586) with MMX bolted on. PPro (P6, i686) doesn't have MMX (being introduced before the Pentium MMX). PII united the two designs. It features a PPro core _and_ MMX. So I guess the meaning of P MMX is pretty clear. It refers to the classic Pentium with MMX. > Skipping 386 for 486 seems acceptable because nowadays, a distro > requires more HD space and RAM than it's possible to add with usual 386 > motherboards, You could always burn a CD-ROM for /usr :-) > but dropping all Pentiums until Pentium II generation > seems completely foolish. I hope I misunderstood your message. I'd drop the sub-pentiums (i.e. 386 and 486) entirely. Not that my vote would count... -- Best Regards, | Hi! I'm a .signature virus. Copy me into Sebastian | your ~/.signature to help me spread!