On 7/16/07, Brian Verre <bverre@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
While I sympathize with people wanting to use older machines to mess around (I have a few myself ATM), as a general question, wouldn't it make more sense to cut ties with this older hardware while Haiku is a fledgling system?
I think it depends on what benefits this might bring. For example just how much developer time would be saved if we actively decided not to support machines older than some decided age?
Target i686/x64 for R1, etc? A quite affordable 'modern' system can run QEMU at P/200 speeds, or just use virtualization. I built a new AMD64 system for a friend for around $200 (complete) a few months ago. Used case, 40gb drive and DVD/CDR drive sure, but the HD can be had for $10 used, and the disc drive $20 new if I didn't have a couple.
No doubt computers are quite affordable these days (at least to those of us in Western countries.) But many people have older computers that could become nice little systems with a good OS like Haiku installed.
Maybe I'm off base here, but it is an honest question about moving on. Use those old PCs as appliances of some sort instead?
Running what, Linux? That is always an option of course. I for one would like to be able to run Haiku on some of my older machines. Again it depends on what effort is required to get Haiku running on MOST older machines. This seems like an application of the Pareto principle, aka the 80/20 rules. If with some fairly small amounts of code (20%) we can support MOST older machines (80%) I think it is worth it. But I don't think effort should be put in to try and support every possible older machine. Of course in that case drivers for peripherals become as much of an issue as the chipset and processor. Maybe if every developer did the work to support their own older machines (I for one have quite a collection), that would cover most of the bases. Ryan