On 11/11/2011 1:15 PM, Barry Warsaw wrote:
On Nov 10, 2011, at 06:08 PM, Dotan Cohen wrote:
Most people that I know are using 3-5 year old hardware, and I would
say that the 5-8 year hardware is more common than 0-3 year old
hardware. Maybe we have less of a wasteful culture than those who
replace their entire desktops every<5 years, but even in instances
where a user _does_ replace his hardware so often, what becomes of
that hardware? I'll tell you: it becomes some relative's computer. Or
some neighbour's.
I've used this fact very effectively to migrate people to Ubuntu. Many times,
they have an older computer that just starts dogging under Windows, maybe
because of bloatware, malware, or whatever. Instead of spending $$$ on a new
computer, I'll give them a CD and tell them to give Ubuntu a try. I've had
more than one friend/relative become very happy Ubuntu users because it
breathed new life into old hardware. How awesome is it that you just saved a
friend several hundred to a thousand dollars *and* stealthily gave them some
freedom too?
(The servers in my closet are both at least a decade old, and happily run
10.04 LTS. I hope to be able to upgrade them to 12.04 LTS.)
PAE was first added in Pentium Pro in 1995. So your servers have to be
~16 years old to not support it.
So yes "a decade old" is still new enough, 2 decades old is not. Looking
here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
I'm trying to correlate that with:
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickrefyr.htm
And it looks like there is a 400MHz processor introduced around 1999. So
you're still looking at 1 decade being new enough, but slightly more
than that not.
I certainly ran a 450MHz dual-celeron A server for many years before I
finally upgraded it to PIII 700 (fastest I could find that could fit in
the slot).
From what I can tell, the PIII version should have PAE.
If you do end up dropping non-PAE, I think you need to do two important
things:
* Provide a very easy way for folks to determine whether their hardware is
affected or not.
* Absolutely, positively, refuse to begin to upgrade such machines. There's
nothing worse than bricking their working hardware.
I'll note with a little sadness my inability to upgrade my first gen MacBook
Pro 1,1 to Lion because it doesn't support the Core Duo chip in that old
machine. Hey wait, I know a good free operating system that *does* run on it!
-Barry
John
=:->
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