On 08/28/2011 11:37 PM Always Learning wrote:
> 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)."
Paul, this is good to read, but irrelevant. I'm currently using 2G of
RAM in this machine (less in the others), run several server apps as
well as client apps and 2G of RAM suffices quite nicely. Only token
amounts of swap are used. I could upgrade this box to 4G of RAM, but
what for? It's not needed. Nothing would run any faster or better. So
what's the point?
>
>> 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 ?
Really...? "blame"...? If this CPU functions just fine on RH/CentOS 5.6
and other distributions, by what rationale can it be blamed for anything?
>
> 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.
Of course I *could* possibly do this. To what end? As said, the apps
I'm using wouldn't run any better or faster. It's much easier and
simpler and faster and cheaper to download a different distribution.
>
>>> 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.
Re: the question. I wouldn't think so either. It wouldn't make sense
to require pae for 6.0 but not for 6.1 and beyond.
That "spare time" factor... yeah. Upgrading CPUs doesn't fit into the
precious few spare time slots in my calendar.
>
> 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.
I hope we're not going to start rationalizing the presence of linux bugs
on the basis of Microsoft's record of failures.
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
