Debian farewells Pentium Debian is farewelling a bunch of legacy processors, including Pentium. While Linux may still be touted as the best way to keep an ancient PC on life support, there are limits, it seems. As kernel developer Ben Hutchings explains in this post, Debian is inheriting the change from gcc, which no longer supports pre-686 …
I've got a Pentium 4 670 3.8 GHz box here which is working very well with Debian on it. Perhaps this announcement is a good reminder for me to think about changing the CPU/MB. At 115W it's not as beneficial in the summer as it is in the winter. In fact I could probably replace it functionally with something that uses 20 Watts.
While the Pentium 4 isn't being "farefelled", I know what you mean about older chips that are hot and thirsty.
I've got a AMD dual core X64 based server that I'll probably replace with a modern dual core Pentium, I'll get half the heat, save half on electricity and it should also be faster too...
"older chips that are hot and thirsty"
About 5 years ago, I decided to get a real server to replace my aging repurposed desktop based server. Being on a very limited budget, and not having as much understanding as I should have, I bought an old ProLiant based on the P4-generation Xeon for about £100.
I realised this was a mistake soon after. While the management features were great, the system burned leccy, made enough noise to keep me awake, and needed the window open in summer or it overheated. It was replaced by another desktop-based unit quite quickly.
...and I don't think it's reasonable to keep supporting what are now very old processors in current releases of operating systems. However, the older versions of the OSes will still work on those CPUs, so all is not lost. It's just that any patches might not be automatically available. But if someone is really determined to keep old PCs running and patched, with Linux at least they can (for the moment at least) add the patches manually.
My cousins, condemned by 'time' to be over-60, mostly have Pentiums. No way will they go to PCUniverse, pay good money and get terminally confused. XPpos seems to work perfectly well for them, so should we now abandon hope for upgrade to Linix-on-elderly Desktop?
Even as someone with an active interest in vintage computers, I still can't see this causing grief for people. I agree that a nice old pentium chip is a perfectly good CPU and you can do lots of interesting things with it, but I don't think it's very practical for a modern browser. As for running XPpos, that's fine, but you don't need to go buy a new computer for that since there is a truckload of perfectly good later generation Pentiums available for free.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
