On Thu, May 05, 2016 at 06:57:22PM -0400, Steve Litt wrote: > > Not worth the effort, I'd say. Jessie still has four years of > > security support (I don't think Devuan has the manpower to provide > > security support for 40k+ packages alone after Debian ends it), and > > if you'd _still_ run that museal machine at that time, you can > > reconsider. > > We need to pick our battles. I bought a Pentium II, a 686, in 1998. > That's a little over 18 years ago. The last 32 bit Pentium, the Pentium > 4, stopped selling in August 2008: That's 8 years ago.
Actually, roughly half of P4 models supported amd64. I don't know when i386-only ones stopped being produced, but I assume it was a good time before 2008. > And since 2004, you could, and many people did, buy 64 bit machines. A > 586 or 32 bit machine is doubtlessly so old that getting one replacement > part would cost quite enough to just dumpsterize the computer (unless one > has a basement full of cannibalizable computers). Actually, there's still a 32-bit P4 running at one of my customers. A samba file server -- not something you need a fat machine for. I do have a 64-bit P4 in my own cellar, doing backups. But these are P4, not 586. You can't even attach a non-ancient disk to the latter, so file serving purposes are out. A vast majority of uses that don't need a big disk are better served by a cheap-ass ARM SoC like RPi (if you want gigabit ethernet, most of RPi's competitors have it). Electricity cost difference will pay off that investment in a couple months... So, the only reason I can fathom for using a 586 is if you have some specialty hardware with an ancient connector, like an ISA card. But those invariably require software of matching age that's unlikely to run on a modern distribution. Thus, I don't think there's a point in supporting 586 in a future release. -- A tit a day keeps the vet away. _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
