I am also interested to know why the i386 kernel has not been included. A lot 
of people still used 486 PC for servers.

That one I can answer. Red Hat 8 supports pentium or higher class hardware. That
really reflects the tools and environment we design for. You can build an 8.0
environment with your own 486 kernel just about but at that point its really
very customized rather than Red Hat as such.

In many ways this is a business decision. If you feel strongly its not a wise
one then do send email feedback to Red Hat about it

I don't know if this is related, but I am running on a VIA chipset 
(VT82C693A/694x, VT82C598/694x, VT82C686) and get very strange behaviour 
from running UML. I have tried the following root filesystems from 
http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/dl-sf.html :

  root_fs.rh-7.2-full.pristine.20020312.bz2  (RedHat 7.2 filesystem)
  root_fs_toms1.7.205.bz2                    (tomsrtbt filesystem)

In addition I have tried to make an self-install (?) of RH8 using the 
description here:

  http://linuxhacker.ru/uml/

"Strange behaviour" includes random hangs during the UML startup process,
and (except for the tomsrtbt image) problems starting additional ttys 
(there semmes to be no connection from UML linux to host linux?), and 
problems mounting from nfs server. In addition; the UML processes never 
comes down clean - there is always several processes in the host left 
hanging that needs to be killed manually.

Thats unrelated - please file a seperate bug for it

Package dropped