Quoting Dag Wieers dag@wieers.com:
What exactly is causing anything lower than i686 to fail ? If it is anaconda, CentOS could patch it slightly. If it is the kernel, we could build a i386 one ?
Not sure if we want to do this. What are the arguments for and against this ? I do see some benefit to have RHEL2.1 and even RHEL3 to work on < i686.
First, thanks to everybody who replied so far. Instead of sending dozen individual replies to the list, I'll just summarize all in one email.
There's no point in allocating resources to make 2.1 run on i586. I'd probably be the only user of it. But if somebody wants to do it just for fun, I'd be happy to do couple of reinstalls on my laptop ;-)
The only reason I attempted install was because it was an old laptop (Pentium MMX 233 MHz, 256 megs of RAM, 4 GB hard drive). A bit more lightweight desktop of 2.1 and smaller install size would probably be a better fit than 3.8 (or 4.4). Even with 256 of RAM, MMX is still slow CPU (by todays standards, compared to i486 it was lighting fast).
Given the disk size, selecting the "Workstation" installation on 3.8 gives you "not enough disk space" error. I used to have 40 GB drive in that laptop, but it died (hence the reinstall), and I dag out the original old 4GB disk.
CentOS 3 and 4 do install nicely on i586. Actually, I have another i586 box that I use at home as firewall, running CentOS 4 (it used to run Fedora Core 1 and 2 before that). I bought two of them for couple of dollars on garage sale couple of years ago, and it has been running very nicely since. Thanks to everybody who put work to make CentOS 4 run on such an old box.
On the laptop, I've simply gave up from 2.1 and installed 3.8. It seems to be running OK, there's still couple of problems to sort out. It doesn't detect sound chip, and for whatever reason runs the video card in 800x600 SVGA mode, instead of 1024x768 (however, it does detect correct graphics chip). So the screen looks a bit weird. I'll sort those out as soon as I find some time to play with it. I do remember that CentOS 4 didn't had those problems (I had it installed on this same laptop long time ago, than wiped it out since it was too slow).