Hello,
I've been trying to get in contact with some of the development team regarding i586 support in C5, I was kindly pointed in this direction.
Reading the archive I can see that it's not a planned feature excerpt below:
"The problem is that we do not want to support i586 on c5 and forward because the anaconda changes required to make install possible are much harder than on CentOS-4.
With the development of the c5 liveCD and that also depending on anaconda, we do not think that i586 support is really worth the risk of incompatibility that major changes to anaconda can cause.
Also ... the C5 openssl and glibc do NOW build on i586, however they are not guaranteed to do so in the future. We have already had the centos-4 glibc NOT building on i586 and that causing problems in the past.
We will support i586 on CentOS-4 until 2012, but I don't see us supporting it at this time on CentOS-5. That could change."
I'd just like to throw my 2pence/2Cents in and explain why I think it should be supported, and then offer some help in developing it.
While most people seem to think that i586 is totally obsolete, I still use a few modern systems that use i586 instruction sets and may even consider a few more. For example I run a Via Epia ME6000 (600Mhz) as a silent HTPC with 1G ram.
With the over abundance of processing power in a modern computer and the proliferation of embedded type system running at home by hobbyists' and enthusiasts for asterisk and other single application. Given that Chips like the i586 Geode and Via Epia are popular it seems a little backward to me to stop supporting it.
Of course there are other distributions that will cover these. But I'm a Centos Fan and would prefer to continue running it on all my machines rather than only some.
So to this end I'd like to try and get some movement behind this. Knowing that first it looks like I'm going to have to get the powers that be to agree that it could be included if enough work could be done.
Manuel