On Wed, Jul 01, 2020 at 08:18:37PM +0200, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> Hi!
>
> spiralofhope - 01.07.20, 05:53:38 CEST:
> > On Wed, 1 Jul 2020 16:53:19 +0200
> >
> > "Dr. Nikolaus Klepp" <dr.klepp@???> wrote:
> > > A word of condolence to anybody fixed on old hardware. If you cannot
> > > upgrade, there is still the BSD-family which offer support down to
> > > 80486. And they, too, are systemd-free
> >
> > It's been a while, but I wonder if Slackware would be the Linux
> > alternative:
> >
> > http://www.slackware.com/
> >
> > There is a non-SMP (single processor) kernel mentioned here:
> >
> > http://www.slackware.com/releasenotes/14.2.php
>
> I bet one could use "make bindeb-pkg" to just build a kernel package
> that works on this old hardware and then stuff it into the machine
> *before* upgrading.
>
> Unless it is not just the kernel but also glibc or something somehow not
> working on older hardware.

It may well be that the newer hardware has machine instructions not
available on older hardware, and that the compilers that generate
packaged code use those machine instructions; in which case the new
packages would be quite incomatible with the old hardware.

-- hendrik