Do not worry! The i586 ARCH support really really old hardware. I.e. a Pentium (MMX) clocked at 66MHz is old enough for you? Don't expect to drive a "snappy" KDE4 desktop, though...

Last summer I had to do some Linux training for a company in Montpellier. They had ordered a couple quad-core server racks for teaching purposes, but there was a delay with the delivery, and when the training began, I had twelve students and no hardware. In the storage room, I found an antique Dell Poweredge 1300 server (P-III processor, 110 MB RAM, 3x9 GB SCSI disks). Slackware 14.1 32-bit installed perfectly on that machine. I had to go for it twice, since the exotic disk controller needed to be included explicitly in the initrd. Out of curiosity, I gave various other distributions a spin on the same hardware, and they all failed miserably.

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PIII is a respectable i686, starting with a clock from 450MHz, if I remember right...

In your case, both i486 and i586 will happily run. In fact, even a pure i686 distro, like Arch, will work fine. What you, most probably, hit, was the memory constraints. Which are 128MB for the Slackware (text) installer, and, of course, much higher for the distros who use a graphical installer. Being written in Python (like is Anaconda) and having to resolve dependencies graphs, sure wasn't helped. With enough memory, any reasonable modern distro will run in this hardware.

So, I can see your story as a pro argument for the Slackware text installer, as memory constraints, but as pro or against i586 arch it does not count.

BTW, the ol'good graphical installer of DARKSTAR, written in Qt, and called YaLI, used to go South on sub-256MB RAM systems, right for those memory constraints as reasons, too...

BUT, we shall remember that a typical i486 system sported memory from 4MB to 16MB. And there even the Slackware installer will kick the bucket.

As long as the compiler and standard libc are built for a certain architecture, there's going to be a set foundation of the code. If glibc and gcc were built only to 80386 optimizations, Slackware would technically be an i386 distribution. Even if 99.99 of the packages were i686, these two packages are what define the distribution, especially when you import a raw package that isn't optimized.

The installer actually will work, but in the non-traditional sense of manually installing packages.

I haven't owned a 32-bit system since the Athlon/Turion64 X2 series started up, and the last CPU of that flavor was an Athlon T-Bird 1.4 GHz which lasted me about 9 years.

Well, my dear frenemy, in a real i486 system with 4MB memory, the Slackware installer cannot even start. Practically, even the huge kernel cannot be mapped in memory and the Linux fail to boot.

BTW, maybe is useful to not enter in this discussion, where I, for several good years I studied, tested and implemented diverse methods to install a Slackware (based) distro, while you look to go with your typical "political" speech...

Talking about a 99.99% i686 Slackware, but still being an i386 distro, defined by GLIBC and GCC, and ignoring that is impossible to have this working team for i386, sadly, I will beg to differ. That combination will be just an terrible un-optimized i686 distro.

Because, for having a functional distro, you shall be able to arrive, at minimum, into console, where you should do things sucessfully. Everything else, beyond GCC and GLIBC, including the kernel and the user-land, being i686, trying to boot this thing in a i486 or i586, will fail miserably.

You'll argue about a custom kernel built first. That's OK, but, even if you use a HUGE variant, without an initrd, the game will be over when INIT is loaded. More precisely, when INIT is NOT loaded, because is a i686 binary...

Some i486 systems can expand up to about 16~32MB of RAM, which is a lot for an i486 mind you, and yes, most came stock with 4~8MB, although technically, an i486 can effectively read up to 4GB of RAM, but finding a system like that would be next to improbable and impossible. Then again, finding SIMM chips that would have paired 8MB sticks in batches of 4 in a system was a true find back in the day. I've only seen one system with a full 32MB (8MBx4) SIMM configuration, and it was a desktop that had been heavily recycled.

However, yes, i486 does pose some limitations, but it is a stock implementation regardless, and possibly for good reason since many of the packages are still i486, especially in the /a directory, minus the SMP kernels. In truth, i686 might be a better call, but supporting Pentium Pro and such CPUs might still be a good choice.

There's probably a few small servers out there in the wild using this hardware, and who knows the who, why, how, or what of their needs to still use i486.

Given the cost of RAM in those days I would be very surprised if the stock configuration was four to eight megabytes of RAM, but, then it has been quite a few years and my memory is not what it use to be. I do distinctly remember that in the late days of the 286 and into the early days of the 386, one megabyte of RAM was around $300.00. That's right, one megabyte was, Three Hundred Dollars, U.S. Forty megabyte hard drives were about $350.00. I once got a "hot deal" on a 80 megabyte Seagate HD for $705.00

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what, my x86_64 was dropped?

Of course not. This was a reference to 32-bit Slackware.

next time I will not forget to add the smiley

Just for information, i586 means:
- Intel Pentium (released 1993)
- AMD K5 (released 1996)
- Cyrix 6X86 (released 1996)

I would think that anyone who has to run a system with older hardware should have no problem to keep them to Slackware 14.1, which should have still support for 3-4 years, and after support ends to compile necessary security updates themselves.

@ReaperX7: Pentium Pro is i686

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so anybody know what instructions i586 has that i486 doesn't
or is this just talk ?

Oh yeah, I forget Pentium Pro came in that awkward time between Pentium MMX and Pentium II/Celeron era. Wasn't that one the CPU that had that weird bug with the FPU?

Just out of curiosity, what other distros? Did you try any of the ones intended for older hardware? Like rlsd or puppy?

MMX.

That was the first-generation Pentium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug