On Mon, Jul 04, 2005 at 01:47:27AM -0400, der Mouse wrote:
> 32MB is now considered "tiny"?!

Hey, we are talking in the context of i386 GENERIC or INSTALL here. And I do
have working i386 hardware (not sure about the floppy drive, but oh well)
which has 32MB RAM because at the time I wanted something realy big (and had
the money to waste). I still use it sometimes for testing.

The point is that give the i386 hardware ... diversity, and using some simple
statistics, it is pretty well obvious that installing on a i386 machine with
ISA or EISA slots, or less than 128 MB memory (where Windows starts to crawl),
will be a very tiny minority of the installs.

I think it is a reasonable choice to optimize the easy install process for
mainstream/common install scenarios. Anyone installing on a EISA machine
nowadays will be a freak like me (and I guess you) - and have no problem with
slightly more complicated install procedures.

This, by no means, should say that we should stop supporting smaller
machines. I still like the way we are able to work on 4 MB DSL
routers/firewalls with trimmed kernels and beat most other OS performance
wice by an order of magnitude.

> I am...well, pretty much speechless.

Sorry, I didn't think I could do that to you ;-)

Martin