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Arch Linux is moving ahead with preparing to deprecate i686 (x86 32-bit) support in their distribution.
Due to declining usage of Arch Linux i686, they will be phasing out official support for the architecture. Next month's ISO spin will be the last for offering a 32-bit Arch Linux install. Following that will be a nine month deprecation period where i686 packages will still see updates.
Any Soylentils still making major use of 32-bit x86? And any of you using Arch Linux? Distrowatch still lists Arch Linux as a top 10 distribution.
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Arch Linux Preparing To Deprecate i686 Support
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In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus,
"one when he was a boy and one when he was a man."
-- Mark Twain
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:39PM
There are millions of devices out there that match the description of the kind of computer that you cannot even imagine; believe it or not, for most of modern computing, people have run 32-bit x86 systems, and they are still capable of running anything that is worthy of being considered "an entire Linux distro".
Maybe your Linux distro wouldn't be such a bloated piece of junk, if the developers were more concerned with making sure it could run on such "ancient" machines.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:11PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Touché) by Knowledge Troll on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:24PM
I have a 5 watt embedded 32bit X86 machine with 2 gigs of RAM you insensitive clod.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday January 26 2017, @05:37PM
Curious as to what system that is.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DECbot on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:43PM
I have two PCs with a VIA C7 Eden CPU. These are passively cooled and barely sip power. They work great for my home server needs--one file server and a second web/email server.
I am retiring the file server so I can take advantage of ZFS, I rather not retire the email/web server as that box works like a champ. I was also planing to use the old file server as a pfsense box. As more Linux distributions ditch i686, I think I will have to switch fully to BSD or one of the 'do everything from source' distributions like Gentoo or Slackware.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @04:19PM
Wow, that brought back memories. I remember the time my friend booted his computer and I hadn't heard of VIA yet, but staring back at me in the console was "VIA VIA VIA" where I had always seen "AuthenticAMD." Asked him about it, he had no idea, so I asked his father, who just laughed when we insinuated that he hacked the machine to get the message there.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 26 2017, @06:53PM
Wow, that's some proper old kit.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Friday January 27 2017, @06:49AM
Slackware is NOT a source distribution, though there are included tools and available repositories of source based packages (sbopkg and slackbuilds.com being the most well known in those categories). .t?z packages are binary packages and the system is installed from such packages, with some repositories also being available for non-included software (Alienbob's repo probably the most well known here, able to be access with slackpkg+ in a similar fashion to using apt-get).
I guess the point is, it's not nearly as time consuming as installing and keeping up to date an actual source based distribution such as Gentoo. Anyone who's ever compiled VLC from source will agree that perhaps it's better not to have to. Slackware got it's name because it IS designed for slackers. Just not corner cutters.
(Score: 1) by Triddle on Friday January 27 2017, @02:12AM
Perhaps, but my Acer netbook still runs pretty well, and given the size it is very convenient when I don't wish to cart my 64 bit notebook around. I'd also care a lot less if it was stolen or damaged.
Both run FreeBSD perfectly well, although only 32 bit on the netbook of course. If a Linux distro won't run on hardware like that then fine, but it doesn't mean that hardware has ceased to exist or be useful.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Monday January 30 2017, @04:11AM
Of course, it depends on what you're going to do with it. A P4 would probably not be a very good choice for something that runs 24/7, but if it's only going to see a couple hours a week of use the payback in power savings is going to be a very long time.
A P4 with 2-3GB of ram should have no problems running most version of Linux. It'll even run Windows 7 in an acceptable manner. Plus there's other 32-bit chips out there too, Pentium M/Core Solo/Core Duo, and they were still making 32-bit Atoms not too long ago (most of which are slower than a P4 anyway).