A Proposal To Go 64-bit Only With Fedora 23

[Kivada]

It's really difficult to find good old (REALLY OLD) i686 computers, which means old Pentium or Athlon(without -64 suffix) computers.
I don't think such a system will have sufficient memory to run modern desktop distro smoothly.

I would definitively use CentOS 5 rather than Fedora on such systems.

The only good ones to try and use these days are the Athlon XP's with a 400Mhz FSB, the few socket 775 Prescott P4's that had Hyperthreading, 800Mhz FSB and 1Mb of L2 or the handful of Core Duos that actually made it to market.

Anything else that age that you'd have an acceptable level of performance on with a modern distro like Fedora would HAVE to be a 64 bit CPU.

[duby229]

I had a P4 Sony Vaio that, apart from weighing a ton and being built like a tank, blew like the fires of hell. The battery life was so miserable, I rarely relied on it. I hated that thing. There's a reason why Intel based Pentium M on P3 and not P4.

It must have been a Prescott. Like I said it's "Fire and Brimstone" hot.

Other thing, Prescott and Pentium D only implemented the PNI (Prescott New Instructions) extension to support 64bits. Which was missing a few instructions compared to amd64. So it isn't fully x86_64 compatible.

[Kivada]

Holy shit the ignorance in this thread is astounding. Consider me the resident computer hardware expert from now on. There were many Pentium 4 systems with 4 DDR slots, which means they can use 4GB of RAM with an OS that supports PAE. I have a 500Mhz Powermac G4 with 1.25GB of RAM that other than being really slow works fine as a daily driver with OS X Tiger. It would also work fine on Linux if I bothered to spend hours and hours setting Debian up; MintPPC did all of the hard work for you, but the author won't be spinning a new version himself in the near future, and it really needs it.

Yeah, and I have a dual 800Mhz G4 Quicksilver tower with 1.5Gb of ram, guess what, Mac OS is only used for my old games and only offline as there are no and will not be any security updates for it and the only browser that can be called remotely useable in the last 5 years for it is TenFourFox which is always behind the curve on updates and is only maintained by a single guy, too bad that the box doesn't like Any Linux distro since the community build of Ubuntu 11.10, which is also way out of date.

Keep in mind that a G4 is about 2x as fast per clock as a P4 is due to it's very short pipeline.

On top of that, try finding 512Mb-1Gb DIMMs of DDR at a reasonable price these days, I know, I checked to find some for the old Socket 768 and 939 boxes I have that only have 2-3Gb of ram each, you can't even beg for them as nobody that has them is willing to give them up, but it's easy to get your hands on some 1-2Gb dimms of DDR3 1066-1600Mhz for free to only a few dollars as people upgrade to higher capacity kits.

It just doesn't make economic sense to keep using the old 32 bit box if you have any choice in the matter.

FYI, I'm a poor dumpster diving tech that either sells or donates the comps with Linux on them, I don't even bother picking up 32 bit hardware these days save to salvage ram, HDDs and DVD burners out of them.

[Mat2]

And guess what...? Your Intel Core 2 Duo is 64bit! If referencing Wikipedia, the last 32bit processor made by Intel was of the Netburst Architecture in 2004. First 64bit processors appeared in 2003. I think a chip that's 12 years old wouldn't cost much nowadays, would it? Heck, we have boards coming out with descent specs that are sub-50$ price range. Your argument is dead in the water. Just wasted cycles on an architecture that should have been retired a whie ago.

I know it and am going to switch in the near future (for causes unrelated to anyone dropping support for 32-bit).

So go ahead and mantain 32-bit Fedora by yourself. The Fedora devs don't owe you anything.

Yup.
I'm using Ubuntu BTW.

Ubuntu is still maintaining the powerpc port (it is a community release, not a Canonical one) which is even less popular then i386.

But can afford to pay for old system power consumption? How is that possible?

A new PC costs around $500 - $700 (I'm guessing, don't know the real numbers in US). That's $50-$70 a year (assuming it is used for 10 years) and around $4 - $6 a month.
1kWh costs around 15 cents ( http://www.eia.gov/electricity/month...m?t=epmt_5_6_a ) . For $5 You could buy 33 kWh. Assuming a PC consumes 50W on average (excluding a monitor) You have
33 * 1000 Wh / 50 W = 660 h
that's 22h a day.
Most people use the PC (in home) for several hours a day at most.

So the "money saving" argument is moot.

[Kivada]

Very little of an old P4 system is reuseable. The peripherals...probably, but not many mainboards built today still have floppy & IDE connectors. DRAM from an old P4 is most likely unuseable on a new mainboard. So that leaves anything that's SATA or external USB to be easily transferred to new hardware.

Some of the cheepest PC packages that I have seen in "advertised sales" run around $200 USD. The CPU is most likely a low-end AMD APU model or Intel BayTrail-based Celeron.

You could "go cheeper" and get an ECS LIVA-X for around $150-$200 USD, maybe less, but it lacks "expandability" and lots of connectors that many might find "useful to have".

All of these options can run x86-64 code and have a decent amount of memory. ECS LIVA-X has 2G or 4G of DDR3L, mSATA, and 32G or 64G of eMMC, so it could even run Windows 7 via mSATA.

Tablets might be even cheeper, but you might not have a "Linux option" for them; they could be "Android only" type hardware or "difficult to hack" platforms.

In my dumpster diving experience 70% of the boxes on the side of the road, even the late model P4s, if they had SATA on the mobo had a SATA HDD in them, DDR3 ram in the 1-2Gb range can be found 2nd hand for peanuts, the old PSU and case can be reused, as I stated, I picked up the ECS KBN/2100 for only $30 and got 4Gb of ram for it for free by asking in a tech forum, put it in a found case with a found PSU and a found 360Gb HDD and a found DVD burner.

I did the same for a second one that I spent a few dollars more on just to add in a 4 port Gbit PCIe card and a found 802.11B/G/N mPCIe card so I could use it as a PFSense caching router/AV/firewall/wifi.

[Kivada]

Well that is perfectly possible:

Taking in account amount of hardware that would need to be replaced and its cost, you do the math as for how many hours per day PC works, how many days per year, how much energy saved per hour...then you realize that you only gonna recover the investment after X or even XX number of years and by that by time, "new" PC needs to be replaced, so you gained nothing...assuming that "new" PC doesn't breaks and needs repair, in witch case you actually loose more than stay still.

Example
I have two "old" CRTs, that even if we don't consider the amazing image quality they have compared with LCDs, the energy saved by going LCD-LED taking in account life span of LCD-LED and their cost, doesn't compensate AT ALL replace them.

As I said, no additional costs, you just have to put in a modicum of effort instead of money and you to can have a complete PC with a current gen APU, even if it's the slowest version of it because it's still far faster then the P4 and can at the very least playback HD video and run some modern games like Shadowrun Returns and Dungeons Of Dredmor.

[Kivada]

Well that is perfectly possible:

Taking in account amount of hardware that would need to be replaced and its cost, you do the math as for how many hours per day PC works, how many days per year, how much energy saved per hour...then you realize that you only gonna recover the investment after X or even XX number of years and by that by time, "new" PC needs to be replaced, so you gained nothing...assuming that "new" PC doesn't breaks and needs repair, in witch case you actually loose more than stay still.

Example
I have two "old" CRTs, that even if we don't consider the amazing image quality they have compared with LCDs, the energy saved by going LCD-LED taking in account life span of LCD-LED and their cost, doesn't compensate AT ALL replace them.

*cough* $80 Acer K202HQL 1600x900 http://pcpartpicker.com/part/acer-monitor-umiw3aa008 */cough*
*wheeze* $66 Hannspree HL161ABB 1366x768 http://pcpartpicker.com/part/hannspree-monitor-hl161abb */wheeze*

[Mat2]

The biggest problems here are probably netbooks, not laptops or desktops.
Many/most netbooks with Intel Atom do not support 64-bit. Even many models released in 2011/12 do not support it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_a...rdware_support

Keeping 32-bit around shouldn't be so expensive: after all, almost all apps support it ATM.

[Kivada]

...and i can give you right now an example:
Software for my Vinyl Cutter.

In which case your box is essentially now an embedded system as part of a larger appliance, as such you'd want to pick up some spare parts or if performance mattered and the CPU HAD to be 32 bit for 16 bit compatibility then you'd likely be looking at stocking up on a few socket 775 Presscot Pentium 4 570's as they are the fastest you're gonna find for 32 bit.

[duby229]

The biggest problems here are probably netbooks, not laptops or desktops.
Many/most netbooks with Intel Atom do not support 64-bit. Even many models released in 2011/12 do not support it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_a...rdware_support

Keeping 32-bit around shouldn't be so expensive: after all, almost all apps support it ATM.

That's entirely Intel's fault. They knew full well this was going to happen. The day Atom was announced and it was only 32bits, I said then this was going to be a problem. You should boycott Atom on linux anyway, the igp is a major problem.