On Mon, 16 Oct 2006, John Newbigin wrote:
Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote:
I've just attempted to reinstall my ancient laptop that has Pentium MMX processor. Since it is ancient, I've decided to go with CentOS 2.1. Got stuck, installer claims I need at least i686. Hmmm... I know that 3.8 and 4.4 work without a glitch on i586, so this came as surprise. I even thing original RHEL2.1 might had support for i586 too (but I might be wrong).
Anyhow, what happened with i586 in CentOS 2.1?
Although i386 kernel & glibc are provided, you can not install onto anything less than i686. You will have to attach the disk to something newer to do the install, downgrade the kernel, libc & openssl and then you should be able to stick the disk back into the 586.
Be aware that there may be some i686 instructions in the i386 packages. This is due to packaging and compiler bugs but they are treated as WONTFIX by RH because their minimum supported arch is i686. You should be OK, just don't bet the house on it.
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.
Kind regards, -- dag wieers, dag@wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/ -- [all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]