3 Jun
2013
3 Jun
'13
11:01 a.m.
On 3 June 2013 18:51, Jochen Kunz <jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de> wrote:
On Sun, 2 Jun 2013 07:37:18 -0400
David Riley <fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote:
Yes. This. This is exactly my understanding and impression, only phrased better.
Even if it is still widely-used, the 386 is a very very old, basic CPU
now. If it is around in significant numbers in 5YO systems, I am,
frankly, astounded, but even so, I'm afraid that you must expect 2013
OSs not to run well on 2008 hardware. If said OSs work at all on 1998
hardware, I'd be very surprised, and this is older than 1988 hardware.
Be glad that there are choices and you have the option of running
older, lighter-weight Unixes.
I'm typing right now on a midrange Linux box - a Core 2 Quad Extreme
with 8GB of RAM. I was given it for nothing on my local Freecycle
group; I had to provide my own disks and graphics card.
This quadruple-core 3GHz 64-bit CPU was skipware in 2012.
My laptop was also a freebie: a Core 2 Duo, circa 2? GHz, with 3GB of
RAM and a 250GB disk.
Expecting the same OS to run well on a 25MHz CPU in a couple of meg of
RAM is not reasonable.
--
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Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884
I beg to differ. I've run NetBSD for a long
time on my old (pre-iMac)
PowerPC Macs as well as the 68k series because it still supports
them fairly well. Recent releases (there was a gap from 1.6 to 5.0 where
I didn't upgrade) have been really unpleasantly slow, primarily
because of bloat in the userland.
It makes for a difficult situation; I'd gladly just run 1.6, but any of the
common third-party userland components (Apache, etc.) have the
same problem, and I'd want to be running the latest for security's
sake.
Well. See. Thats how it goes. Time is not standing still. Things
evolve. Things change. Things grow. Thats live. If software, be it an
OS like NetBSD or applications / server daemons like apache, would not
keep up with the general growth of things in the entire eco-system,
it will die.
If you run a current release of a software system, you have to expect
that it needs at least a halfway current hardware to run on.
If you have really old hardware you have to accept that current
software will run slow. If you want fast software on ancient hardware
you have to use contemporary, i.e. ancient software.
If you want "modern" features, you have to run modern software and this
in turn requires "modern" hardware. You have to pay a price for the
improved functionality. Either it will run slow on your 11/730 or you
have to upgrade your hardware. Elsewise stay with older software that
runs fast but lacks newish featurism.
Nevertheless: NetBSD is still compact and efficient in comparision to
most Linux distributions. It is also not tainted with some Linuxisms
like systemd...