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?
On Oct 15, 2006, at 2:22 PM, 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?
RHEL 2.1 and later, to my knowledge, do not install on anything older than i686. When I needed to install RHEL 2.1 on one of these systems, I had to temporarily install on newer hardware, replace the GLIBC, SSL, etc with their 386 equivalents. Since we weren't using a RH kernel, we just placed ours compiled for 486 onto the disk, backed it up, and was able to run it on older hardware.
I may have seen postings about CentOS being compiled for older hardware, but I haven't looked it up, or tried it myself, since my own hardware I've run Centos on is newer than that.
On Sun, 2006-10-15 at 16:20 -0500, Kevin K wrote:
On Oct 15, 2006, at 2:22 PM, 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?
RHEL 2.1 and later, to my knowledge, do not install on anything older than i686. When I needed to install RHEL 2.1 on one of these systems, I had to temporarily install on newer hardware, replace the GLIBC, SSL, etc with their 386 equivalents. Since we weren't using a RH kernel, we just placed ours compiled for 486 onto the disk, backed it up, and was able to run it on older hardware.
I may have seen postings about CentOS being compiled for older hardware, but I haven't looked it up, or tried it myself, since my own hardware I've run Centos on is newer than that.
Kevin is correct ... as far as RHEL is concern, i686 and above is all that is supported for all versions (2.1, 3, 4). That is also the case for CentOS-2.1.
CentOS-3 and CentOS-4 do have i586 support, but that was not added to 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.
John.
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? _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
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]
On Mon, 2006-10-16 at 13:20 +0200, Dag Wieers wrote:
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.
We did rebuild CentOS-3 and CentOS-4 to do this. Where they were concerned, it was just supplying i586 based kernels that get installed via anaconda.
Since the code (from FedoraCore) that was already in anaconda was still there, that was all that was required. There were quite a bit more changes required in anaconda to support BOOTING with either the i586 or i686 kernel for CentOS-4 (that was not required to be looked at on CentOS-3 as it boots an i386 kernel for install by design).
However, CentOS-2 is now really in maintenance mode (no changes except security changes) ... so I would not recommend changing it now.
You can use CentOS-3 or CentOS-4 on an i586 processor ... I would recommend CentOS-3 if your memory is < 256mb.
Thanks, Johnny Hughes
On Mon, 16 Oct 2006, Dag Wieers wrote:
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 ?
Both CentOS3 and CentOS4 provide additional i586 kernel and glibc, mainly for via c3 processors, but should work with any i586 machine.
C4 also has additional required changes to Anaconda to allow for i586 installation (not required in C3 because iirc the boot kernel is i386 rather than i686 based.)
I suspect the same hasnt been done for Centos 2.1
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.
Well as I said c3 & c4 already do - its really up to John if he wants to build those for the 2.1 series, but as it is the first time anyone has asked and it is really eol I would be tempted to say to use CentOS3 or 4 instead.
Regards Lance
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] _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
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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).
I just want to summarise the status of CentOS-2.
The install onto i386 issue is anaconda. It probably is a 1 line python fix. Rebuilding anacona won't help though because CentOS-2 no longer fits onto 2 CDs. This means that you can't (easily) build an install set of CD's.
CentOS-2 will run on i386, you just can't install it. If you want it, swap the hard disk into an i686 to do the install.
Installing CentOS-2 onto new hardware is also problematic. Updating the installer is not possible so the recommended procedure to install for new hardware is again, swap the hard disk, this time into an older i686 box to do the install.
John.
John Newbigin wrote:
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.
John.
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? _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
John Newbigin wrote:
CentOS-2 will run on i386, you just can't install it. If you want it, swap the hard disk into an i686 to do the install.
Hmmm... But there is no i586 (or i386/i486) kernel in the distribution. Only i686 and athlon as far as I can see. I guess the kernel would need to be rebuilt manually before putting the disk back into i586 box. Or would athlon kernel work in it?
Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote:
John Newbigin wrote:
CentOS-2 will run on i386, you just can't install it. If you want it, swap the hard disk into an i686 to do the install.
Hmmm... But there is no i586 (or i386/i486) kernel in the distribution. Only i686 and athlon as far as I can see. I guess the kernel would need to be rebuilt manually before putting the disk back into i586 box. Or would athlon kernel work in it?
Try the boot i386 kernel.
John.
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Lance Davis