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 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
