SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Ubuntu seems to be poising itself to letting 32-bitters alone in the dark:https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2016-June/039420.html
in 2018, the question will come if we can effectively provide security support on i386.
cross-grading between i386->amd64 is not something we can reliably ship. We must continue [to] provide the i386 port, to support multiarch and 3rd party legacy application that are only available as i386 binaries.
Building i386 images is not "for free", it comes at the cost of utilizing our build farm, QA and validation time. Whilst we have scalable build-farms, i386 still requires all packages, autopackage tests, and ISOs to be revalidated across our infrastructure. As well as take up mirror space & bandwidth.
Thus the question is what can we and what should we do to limit i386 installations before they become unsupportable?
In essence this would mean April 2021 as the sunset for i386 as the host/base OS architecture. And April 2023 to run legacy i386applications with security support.
I do use, from time to time, a (then, in 2009) top-of-the-notch 3.4GHz P-IV, for the little gaming I do and for printing. But I did notice even it is easily overwhelmed by many javascript-laden sites. How many soylentils are going to fight tooth and nails to keep their 32 pc's up and running beyond 2018, are 32 bit platforms of any relevance today aside as for IoT or CNC processes?
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday July 05 2016, @09:31PM
And is utterly pointless except as a platform to prepare for the future. It only has 2GB ram and since it is 100% backward compatible all of the SoC bits are going to be strictly 32bit and thus limited to a 4GB address space. Would not be shocked to find that even a well done 64 bit port ran slower on it since the memory pressure would get pretty bad running a web browser + desktop environment in 64bit code with only 2GB.
Which beings us to the poster who brought up Pi in the first place. Any crusty old P4 will beat the ever living snot out of a Pi3 for any typical use. Who cares if the Pi is only $35? How expensive is it after you buy a case, power supply, perhaps a new monitor (if you have VGA), keyboard, mouse (if you have PS/2), etc? To get the joy of an obsolete phone processor repurposed as a (???) then repurposed again to playing at desktop PC? When you already HAVE a faster machine long since paid for? Really?
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday July 05 2016, @09:54PM
Eh, It's not going to be as power friendly as the P4. And a case is like 6 bucks, keyboard and mouse another 10-30 depending on quality or if it's wireless. Monitor? Most everyone has an LCD TV and you can get a low cost 23 inch monitor for $100 or less.
Honestly, if you were on a shoestring budget, a pi and some cheap second hand components scavenged from work/friends/family would get you online and be a valuable learning tool.
My beef with the pi is its garbage SoC and lack of decent I/O. It's a junk SoC that I'm surprised they even bothered to add 64bit cores to. No hardware Ethernet MAC? No external bus other than USB, SPI or i2c? Not a good hardware hacker tool. The Beagle Bone Black is a step up but stuck with a crappy Ti SoC and emmc that likes to shit the bed.
A good hacker board should have one of those FPGA SoC's or an ARM SoC with hardware gigabit, external static memory bus, GPU, and maybe PCIe with an embedded secondary arm core for real-time tasks like the Freescale/NXP i.mx7.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday July 06 2016, @12:02AM
Eh, It's not going to be as power friendly as the P4.
I think you said that backwards.
I never saw a P4 draw any less than 25 or 30 watts.
A Pi 3 would be hard pressed to draw over 12.
What I like about the Pi is the ready availability of several different OS choices, because I have better things to do than write my own os.
There is very little reason to worry about having no actual Ethernet Mac since the version 3 supports WIFI which is what most people are
going to use anyway.
I had keyboards, mice, Monitors laying around. I had it up and running in 30 minutes which included downloading and burning a microsd card.
I would have spent more time and money re-purposing a beater from my closet shrine to obsolescence.
I wanted an expendable machine to read email. That it surfs the web well enough is a freebe.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday July 06 2016, @11:54AM
Oops, you're right.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 06 2016, @01:31PM
Where can you download a MicroSD card? The best I could figure out is to buy it online and have it mailed to you.
Anyway, the downloaded card cannot have been any good if you burned it afterwards. ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 06 2016, @12:40AM
Including space heater.
Look, there's plenty of older PCs that could be put to good use, but the P4 is an abomination, and deserves to die -- even if the only alternative bears the curse of Broadcom.