> On Sat, May 26, 2001 at 07:18:31PM +0200, Viktor Rosenfeld wrote: > > Ben Burton wrote: > > > > > > > ... so you get a bigger machine for the job. > > > > > > I suspect the point of Casper's post was that this is not always possible. > > > > I really have a hard time believing that. > > > > Unfortunatly this is exactly what I mean. > For example I've been following an Internet browser called Arachne > (http://www.arachne.cz) for a long time. It is a fully graphical > browser for DOS which has also been ported to Linux. > It's mostly used by people that can't/won't use windows. At a certain > time changes were made that prevented Arachne from running on 286's. A > hughe roar was made by the community, clearly showing that many people > are still depending on "old" hardware, even in rich countrys.
Come on! I don't mean to be ignorant, but a 286 is 18 years old. The 386 is only 3 years younger. No one is "depending" on hardware this old -- not even in schools. At least not in Europe or North America. I believe that this is rather motivated by wanting to put this old hardware to an usefull purpose -- an attitude that I most certainly appload. But this is all beside the point. The fact is, that one is still perfectly able to run Debian on a 386 with 8 MB of RAM, which coincidentelly is also the minimum requirement for running Linux in the first place. (Okay, so 4 MB might be enough, but only with some magic.) It might not be fast, but this is a 386 we're talking about. It simply isn't fast by todays standards [1]. But for some purposes it's good enough. Now, how is that lessened by the fact, that Debian takes ages to install on such a machine? Not at all. It's obviously a load-intensive job, so you get a bigger machine. And making that process less dependent on CPU power is not an option when this means that core functionality of apt is sacrificed (ie the ability to figure out dependencies). Simply because the vast majority of Debian users has no problem using it (at least speed-wise). No one forces you to use apt. If it's to slow for you, than don't use it, there are alternatives (eg Slackware, installing from sratch). Cheers, Viktor [1] IIRC, the 386 I installed recently had roughly more than 1 BogoMIPS. The 486 I tried a few days later had 7.88 BogoMIPS. This was the stock potato kernel 2.2.17pre-something I believe. The machine I'm sitting in front of right now, is a Celeron 333 -- not exactly the fastest machine in the world, but the fastest I have in my home. It has 680 BogoMIPS. I know that BogoMIPS are ... well, bogus, but I think it proves my point. What do you expect from that kind of performance?
