Ubuntu on a 486?

[Adriano Varoli Piazza]

On 12/13/06, Martin Marcher <martin.marcher at openforce.com> wrote:
> No pun intended but to me it sounds like you'd be better of with a
> distro that is more self made (customized). Maybe I'm a bit too old

No self-made distro before yesterday would have solved this bug,
unless I fixed the source myself.

> school (already ? - damn I'm getting really old) but printing,
> especially to pdfs has worked since I use linux, and has become
> especially easy with cups.
>
> Been a while since I had to deal with *cough* paper and *cough*
> analog data :) but I'm pretty sure I'd figure a quite usefull
> printing setup out again in less than half a day which includes all
> options I need (4 on 1 pages, yada yada, the usual stuff). About

Here, there's no way to convince Evince to print 2 or 4 pages in one
correctly. When it actually does print 4 pages, it prints them in
disorder. It's a fixed upstream bug as of yesterday, as I said. This
isn't a weird printer, just a Samsung laser B/W printer that otherwise
works fine.

> I do think that there lies much more in educating users than you
> think. For the desktop I'm using apple at the moment and have various
> servers to maintain, most of them now run ubuntu, and why?

Educating users? To find ancient hardware? Or to make the most of what
they currently have? I'm currently _very_ angry at my telco (Telecom
Italy), because apparently, malware infecting computers is the cause
of me -and many others here- having routing problems. I.e. I can't see
most sites, I can't download my mail (google and gmail are some of the
few sites I can see, luckily), most of my net traffic times out. And
not only did they not do anything to educate users before, they
actually lied to me when I called and asked. I'm seriously thinking
about writing a nice text to introduce my friends to this "malware"
thing, and how it affects _me_ if _their_ computers are filled with
crap.

Suddenly, the idea of the ISP cutting net access to them until the
users clean their machines is more and more appealing.

I understand you can do a lot of stuff on "old" hardware. I have, and
I still do. But what I wonder (as you are, with apparently different
answers) is: is it fair to ask Ubuntu to support me on "ancient" HW?
I'd say "no". You and others don't seem to think like me, that's all.

> We're even thinking about commercial support, so I'm using this old
> hardware (it's not my hardware but still) and I'm pretty sure that
> within the next 3 month's we'll have a support contract. Which in
> turn makes me pay the developers which in turn (you started talking
> about developers that get paid) would make my vote count more than
> yours (assuming you download ubuntu and don't buy it).

I do, and I don't, respectively. Luckily for me, it doesn't work this
way. And unless you or I start working for Canonical, I doubt this
discussion will do much in this regard.

>
> martin
>
> PS: the mail could be a little confusing I'm going to be nearly 24h
> awake....well looking at the clock I AM 24H AWAKE. NEED COFFEE NEED
> CIGARETTES - so please be patient, I really didn't want to offend you
> even if some parts could sound like that, and I'm too lazy to read
> thru my mail again :)

No offense taken. I've spent a max of 4 days awake, and it was
"interesting". In a Chinese sense. Hope you can get some sleep soon.

-- 
Adriano Varoli Piazza
The Inside Out: http://moranar.com.ar
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