Tumbleweed on old 386 laptop

English Open Chat
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###This is not a complaint or gripe about TW###
Hi, in Feb 2021 I successfully, albeit with a few headaches, installed TW 386 on a very old, very under spec NEC Versa E2000 laptop. It had been running just as a media player in my home gym.

But in all that time I had not upgraded the image as I thought it was running for 1 function only and I had no issues.

Then for some reason a few days ago I decided maybe it’s time, so I ran a zypper dup which seemed to run ok. But when I rebooted - oh the mess - various services including systemd-logind - which did not even exist along with many other systemd services. The laptop was well and truly stuffed and no amount of debugging showed me anything.

I decided to download the latest i586 TW DVD 202411 iso and install from scratch. But that could not work in that it couldn’t run the wifi/eth card.

In the repo I read this README.FIRST file -

These ISO files are published automatically once a new snapshot finished.
They haven't seen any kind of testing before publishing, so download on your
own risk and cost.

Most of the time they work, but there are times when they are broken.

So visit (and edit if you reported a bug severe enough)
http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Tumbleweed

I wonder if that is the case with this iso? Is using i586 being discouraged? Maybe I should have stayed with a nearly 4 year old install.

However, I successfully installed debian 12 i386 and the laptop is getting used again.

Just my experience.

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As there are less and less users with pure 32bit hardware, there are not much ressources (hardware and developer) left to make sure that the 32bit images are working.

When the split between TW 32bit and 64bit happended, the devs asked for help from the users with such ancient hardware to contribute and test. As you can guess, nobody stepped forward and now the 32bit images are in a shape as they are.

The packages get automatically build, but few tests are conducted due to missing hardware and testers.

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It’s really a pity that 32 bit was dropped but I kind of understand why.

This may be clutching at straws but is there an old repo of historical TW i586 iso from 4 years ago - yeah I probably know the answer to that :rofl:

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Hi

Perhaps this…

This one I know not…

5

Thanks for the link Clive. I’ve decided to stick with the debian i386 on the hardware as it works again as a media player. Besides it takes 2.5 hours plus just to install a system on the low spec laptop.

It’s interesting to note that the latest TW i586 iso installs ok on a QEMU/KVM VM.

My second i386 ASUS eeepc laptop still runs opensuse 13.1 (harlequin) - I’m leaving that one alone :slight_smile:

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