On Sun, 2011-08-28 at 22:33 -0400, ken wrote: > On 08/28/2011 09:17 PM Always Learning wrote: > Broadly speaking it's a pentium i686, but without pae. The fact that > this machine is excluded from RH/CentOS doesn't bode well for Linux. The i686 is an i386 32 bit CPU and needs PAE to address more than 64 GB. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P6_%28microarchitecture%29 states about the i686:- "PAE and wider 36-bit address bus to support 64 GB of physical memory (the linear address space of a process was still limited to 4 GB)." > Well, since I've got two or three other machines I'm either upgrading or > installing linux on, machines that are older than this one, I guess I'm > done with RH/CentOS. Is your use of a particular Intel CPU really to blame and not necessarily Centos ? You could stay with Centos 5.x and upgrade to 5.7 when it becomes available. You do not have to upgrade to Centos 6. If the motherboard is fairly modern, and has the correct type of CPU socket, you may be able to replace the CPU for a PAE one. > > I'm waiting for Centos 6.1 before I try version 6. > > Do you think hardware restrictions will be lessened in 6.1? No. I think many initial teething problems will be solved and installation bugs, if any, will be reduced or eliminated. I'm letting the more daring and adventurous folk with lots of spare time discover the problems. When M$ introduced Windows 3, they had to create version 3.1 because of the problems. Even that had bugs so Windows 3.11 was introduced. The same with M$ DOS 6, the eventual stable version was 6.22. The same with Windows 98. That had to be followed by 98 version 2 (Second Edition) and then version 3 (Millennium Edition). Centos is a lot more reliable but there are usually some odd problems with a major upgrade. -- With best regards, Paul. England, EU. _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos