Hello Bryan,
Frankly, I don't think people recognize the _real_ reason for
trying to
keep i386/486 ISA compatibility. It's not to support old systems, but to
support i386/486 ISA embedded microprocessor cores in all sorts of black
box solutions. These solutions have full desktops/GUIs far more than you
may think.
i386 still being around would be a reason to not even bump the minimum
architecture to i486. But I am not sure if Fedora/RHEL would be the
proper distributions to put on such devices. I'd assume the main
packages (kernel and glibc) need to be rebuild (or replaced in the case
of glibc) for such devices anyway, looking at their size...
Leonard.
--
mount -t life -o ro /dev/dna /genetic/research