Fedora Legacy Shutting Down 180
An anonymous reader writes to pass on the news that the Fedora Legacy project is going away. The project has been providing security updates and critical bugfixes to end-of-life Red Hat and Fedora Core releases. From the article: "In case any of you are not aware, the Fedora Legacy project is in the process of shutting down. The current model for supporting maintenance distributions is being re-examined. In the meantime, we are unable to extend support to older Fedora Core releases as we had planned. As of now, Fedora Core 4 and earlier distributions are no longer being maintained. Discussions... on the #Fedora-Legacy channel have brought to light the fact that certain Fedora Legacy properties (servers) may be going away soon, such as the repository at http://download.fedoralegacy.org and the build server."
Re:Justification? (Score:4, Interesting)
Slashdot was the first place I started seeing the mantra "use older distros for older machines" to combat Linux code bloat. So I put it to the test.
An old system (450 MHz K6-3+ saddled with VESA fbdev) under RedHat 6.2, all of its security updates, and a few hand-compiled programs (older ffmpeg, xine-lib with gcc 2.95) can play MPEG4 movies at 512x4xx resolution at about 75% CPU utilization.
The same system, overclocked to 550 MHz and running Gentoo Linux----which I'd expect to perform well with the latest compilers and lean compilation---cannot even play the same file without skipping frames. Evidence that maybe Linux software gets twice slower in 6 years.
Fortunately I have the base install CDs for RedHat 6.2. But the lesson is clear. If old distros disappear they are basically forcing you to throw away old hardware, which is no different from Microsoft. Does it _really_ cost anything more to host old distros and patches, even if they are not actively supported?
Re:Justification? (Score:1, Interesting)