[CentOS-devel] Interest in a 32bit tree of the upcoming CentOS7?

Fri Jan 10 18:35:03 UTC 2014
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Ljubomir Ljubojevic <centos at plnet.rs> wrote:

> If you have a company with 40-50 workstations with 32-bit CPU and 1GB
> RAM, how would you provide all 40-50 via VM's?

Depending on what they are doing, there's a good chance they would be
better off running one or two modern servers with some sort of thin
client access.   The existing workstations would probably work well
enough running NX, x2go, etc. although you don't get any power savings
that way.. Depending on the usage, the host side could either be
simple multiuser access or be carved into VMs per user, group, or
function.

> Developing or poor
> countries use what they can, some even import old PC's from developed
> countries. Even in my country there are many people with 32-bit CPU's
> and 512-1024MB RAM. Some even only have 256MB. It works for what they
> need so they do not want to spend their money if they do not have to.

Actually, I'm with you on this.  Years ago I used a re-spin called
K12LTSP that was maintained up through CentOS5.  You'd install it on a
host with 2 NICs and it would come up working to PXE-boot thin clients
on one interface, providing LAN/internet access on the other
interface.   It wanted to boot the same kernel on the clients as the
server, so it was problematic for older client hardware when RHEL
dropped 32-bit support in 6.x.   There was some effort to package
LTSP5 for 6.x as simple RPMs but I don't think it has been as popular
- or as usable, partly because it is more complicated to set up and
partly because it didn't work for the old hardware typically used as
clients.   (One of its other features was that it came with working
java, flash, and a few other packages pointed at working update
repositories back when that wasn't easy...).

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com