Re: [opensuse] legalities

Richard Creighton wrote:

It is the collection of support software that becomes the personality
of the distribution and it is also the reason our old 486 machines
won't run anymore.

Uh, I'm not sure I can quite follow you. If the openSUSE project built
the distro for the 386 instruction set, the old 486 machines would
still work fine.

It is these neat packages of music, graphics, editors and what-not,
that depend on instructions that the poor old 486 processor simply has
no concept of.

If there is code containing 586 or 686 specific instructions, it
obviously won't work on anything that does not have support for those.
However, regular C code can be compiled not to use such instructions.

So while Linux itself can be compiled to run in a mode that is
compatible with the old box, it is unlikely the rest of any modern
distro will do so as well.

Actually, I think it's quite likely that openSUSE could.

I challange a user of VISTA or even XP to take its' kernel and boot on
a 486...never mind all its bells and whistles, just the
kernel....

I have a suspicion you might be surprised. There's probably still some
OS2 stuff lurking around in Vista.



/Per Jessen, Zürich

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