CentOS - Aug 2005 - New User: Kudos, small/old platform, RPM Illegal Instruction

Hello All!

My 1st use of CentOS went well on my later eqpt. Thanks and congrats on 
a good product.

Figured I might as well see if I could use it on some old stuff, still 
good but obsolete.

Picked an AMD 5x86 (equivalent to a Pentium 75 MHz) and decided to see 
if I could make it my gateway/router.

Had some difficulties, not unexpected. Old CD drive couldn't read the 
CDs. No boot from CD in BIOS. Floppy was broken. Memory is 36 MB. VLB 
MB, appx. 1 GB old slow drives, etc.

Decided to plug HD into another unit and do install there. Went OK, but 
for some reason, all the junk I tried to turn off still appears to get 
started.

Anyway, my problem is that RPM traps with illegal instruction when a 
query all, among other combinations, is attempted.

It does not do it on my AMD XP, but does do it on the old one. Possible 
that RPM was compiled with a later arch specified?

If so, is there a way to recompile it on my faster machine for execution 
on the older machine? Or has someone already fixed this and I can 
download or something?

I'm relatively new to this distribution stuff (been doing LFS in the 
past and many other *IX things before that). I did a search using "rpm 
illegal instruction" of the lists, but didn't see anything that seemed 
appropriate.

By the way, if the rc.sysinit has the swapon moved up to the front, 
things work OK. If not, things freeze up as mem is exhausted. Swapon 
does not appear to be bothered by the fact that LVM is not in control 
yet. Even if it is, I added another disk, set up two swap areas there 
and sailed on. Performance counts on a (equiv. to) P75!  8-O

If all this works out, I'll try to send some money.

Also, *if* I'm able, I will help test what I can. Got an old Aptiva over 
in the corner too.

Hmmm.... am I really a candidate for this org? Maybe not?

Bill Maltby <wild-bill at triad.rr.com> wrote:
> Picked an AMD 5x86 (equivalent to a Pentium 75 MHz)
It is literally a 133MHz AMD486 (i486 ISA,
non-superpipelined).  The 32-bit @ 33MHz FSB results in most
of the performance loss versus a Pentium (which has a 32-bit
@ 60+MHz FSB).

Although they often overclock to 160MHz (40MHz FSB) without
issue, except the PCI/ATA.
> and decided to see  if I could make it my gateway/router.
That's a good roll for it.
> Memory is 36 MB.
I run IPCop on i486, i586 (true Pentium) and i686 (Pentium
Pro) systems.
> Anyway, my problem is that RPM traps with illegal
> instruction when a query all, among other combinations,
> is attempted.
> It does not do it on my AMD XP, but does do it on the old
> one. Possible that RPM was compiled with a later arch
> specified?
Yes.  The K6 is largely i686 compatible (sans cmov), so it at
least runs the i586 installer.  The 5x86 is definitely an
i486.

As much as some would mind me recommending another solution
on the CentOS list, I feel I must.  Consider IPCop 1.4.  It
is a "Linux from scratch" distro (no longer Red Hat Linux
based as of 1.3.0 I believe, maybe it was 1.2.0?).

  http://www.ipcop.org  


-- 
Bryan J. Smith                | Sent from Yahoo Mail
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