jaromil said : > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > > re all, > > On Fri, Apr 03, 2009 at 10:18:53AM +0100, Rob Myers wrote: > > > If the aim of puredyne is to be installed on any old machines people > > have in the classroom or the lab and work straight away so that > > people can just get on with making digital art then hardware > > manufacturers refusal to respect users freedom will *sometimes* be > > at odds with that. > > so far this has been a feature for dyne:bolic, which kept i586 cpu as > a build target until today, avoiding inclusion of proprietary drivers. > > Aymeric stated years ago that these are not goals that pure:dyne > (formerly based on dyne:bolic) can anymore share with dyne.org, > assuming that most "media artists" possess high-end computers and they > are the intended audience for pure:dyne. binary compatibility for 586 > was the first discussion topic, later it became also an argument for > the installation of nvidia and ati proprietary drivers. > > i still hope the pure:dyne developers team will evaluate a common > position on these issues: art can be a relevant activity for different > people in different social situations, an ambitious community effort > as pure:dyne should pick a minimum common denominator and aim at broad > accessibility as base for its requirements. > > i believe we should care to optimise the software rather than require > expensive and closed hardware, else we'll risk to become an > advertisement for the entertainment industry and its decadent waste of > resources.
Thanks for your concern. Indeed, pure:dyne was never meant to run on 586 and never will, that's why we have always recommended PentiumI/II users to run dyne:bolic instead of pure:dyne, because our software was compiled with optimisations only working for generic 686 CPU. Our minimal requirements have always been 686, and the reference machine that was used, and still used for the project is a Pentium III 800 Mhz with 256 Mb of RAM, a CPU that is 10 years old. We also still use the IBM thinkpad x22 as test machine for every release and the machine works without the need of any kernel firmware and microcode unlike most recent laptop and netbooks. If you call that high-end computers, then I don't know anymore. :) The choice was 686 because our work started with Pure Data, and running Pd on something smaller than a PIII 800 had little interest. As the distro grew we added more RT software and more classic tools. We don't claim that pure:dyne is the ultimate distro for all the digital arts of any forms. We stick to a modest spectrum, we do one thing and we try to do it well, in the spirit of the UNIX philosophy. a. --- [email protected] irc.goto10.org #pure:dyne
