Fedora gets nips and tucks with 14 release The Fedora Project, the open source community that creates the Linux variant that eventually becomes Red Hat's commercial-grade Enterprise Linux distro, has kicked out the "Laughlin" Fedora 14 release. Jared Smith, who took over as Fedora Project Leader in June, has one notch on his belt now. You can see the release notes for …
"a 400 MHz Pentium Pro with 512 MB of memory and 10 GB of disk is the recommended minimum configuration for a graphical Linux setup. Try that with Windows 7."
It's nice of you to notice it but I'm afraid I'd better admit that it's mostly what we in the business would call 'a raging porky'. :) We're discussing how to update the listed system requirements. The problem is that Linux is so flexible; it certainly is *possible* to set up a working Fedora environment with minimal hardware that won't make you kill yourself of frustration, but it's not really true of the *default* environment.
For Fedora's standard desktop - GNOME 2.32 with various heavy apps like Firefox and OO.o - a more realistic minimum would probably be a P3 with 1GB of RAM (512MB is just about enough to run Firefox *or* OO.o, these days). To run on a slower system with 512MB you'd probably want to be using Xfce or LXDE and some lighter weight applications.
(There's also a few more basic problems with the stated minimums: there's no such thing as a 400MHz Pentium Pro, they topped out around 200MHz, and I'm pretty sure it was more or less impossible to shoehorn 512MB of RAM into one).
From OpenSUSE 11.3 (current release)
The following requirements should be met to ensure smooth operation of openSUSE 11.3:
* Processor: Intel: Pentium 1-4, Xeon or newer; AMD: Duron, Athlon, Athlon XP, Athlon MP, Athlon 64, Sempron, Opteron or newer
* Main memory: At least 256 MB; 512 MB recommended
* Hard disk: At least 500 MB for minimal system; 2.5 GB recommended for standard system
* Sound and graphics cards: Supports most modern sound and graphics card
Presumably they are wrong too. Firefox is the default browser and OO is included
I cannot test that today, but until six months ago I ran Ubuntu, latest release, on a 512MB machine with a 2GHZ single core/single thread processor.
And I used it for my everyday browsing, mail, a bit of development and video format conversion. True, trying to run more than one Windows VirtualBox instance was an exercise in patience, but other than that the machine was perfectly happy. And I was too.
So maybe a 400MHz CPU is slow, but certainly the amount of memory is not.
is a free LTS release for old fogies like me who are too long in the tooth to upgrade every year.
well, the beauty of linux is the choice. and as soon i configured e16 on ubuntu 10.04, i've decided to stick with it.
however as a long term redhat/fedora user i'm sure that this release will be top notch as always. i'll download and install it on a usb disk the first weekend i get some time to play around.
That's a real shame, I've got an old G5 Mac which dual boots Mac OS and Fedora (so that I can run the latest version of MythTV) it looks like I'll have to start seriouly looking to get a new Intel based box. Either that, or actually pay for OSX 10.5, which will run Myth for a little while at least...
Installed easily enough, a couple of problems but these were easily overcome and I am now working away quite merrily. So far feels good.
As for LTS, as has already been pointed out this isn't really what fedora is about, for that you do need to use another distro or go down the RHEL route.
Or maybe they meant Pentium II... though even that would be near the end of the range.
As for the RAM, though, it's probably spot on; I've run a modern system with as low as 256 MB of RAM, and while it's crawled, it still managed to work. 512 MB, and it would have been a decent system.
They referred to the gcc ppro target which in effect means any P6 core, from Ppro to PIII and some other chips for laptops that used basically the same core (neutrino was P6 based, if I remember well). Of course, later pentium chips are backward compatible with this P6 core, even if very different internally.
The Ppro was also the 1st chip to handle the extended address scheme (PAE), this maybe explaining that, as I believe Fedora since F11 relies on a PAE-enabled kernel in 32bits mode.
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