[rescue] Oracle making just a little harder to keep old machines in use

[Jonathan Groll]

On Thu, May 06, 2010 at 07:41:53PM -0400, Carl R. Friend wrote:
> last experience tells me that the Linux folks are getting to be
> more about "splash and flash" than about performance and economical
> use of hardware resources.  It took TWO DAYS to get CentOS to install
> on a system with 96MB of mainstore -- an embarrassment considering
> what was standard a few years ago.

Part of the problem may lie with the distro, where decisions are made
as to what kernel version and patches are included by default. You may
have had an easier time with Debian. To be fair though, it would be
unreasonable to expect it to support all versions of all hardware,
including old hardware, on all platforms!

Also to be fair the installer should have some way of installing onto
the old hardware in question - it should have some sort of detection
routine that would gracefully decline to install, or offer to install
a 'light' kernel.

I wouldn't expect to run a modern desktop with recent 2.6 kernel with
only 96MB of RAM by default - I'm pretty sure that you can if you're
determined enough - but in hardware of that era the kernel that was
used was 2.4!

Cheers,
Jonathan