On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 3:36 AM, Steve Litt <sl...@troubleshooters.com> wrote: > On Fri, 30 May 2014 03:00:21 +1000 > Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 2:54 AM, Steve Litt >> <sl...@troubleshooters.com> wrote: >> > When I have an extremely RAM starved computer, I put Debian on it >> > every time. CLI Network install works with almost no RAM, and >> > granular choices of things to install guarantees I'll have a small >> > system. >> >> How RAM-starved can you put Debian on, without faffing around too much >> to go minimal? > > The least RAM machine I have available is 128MB. Debian CLI installs > and runs fairly well on it. Debian + X + fvwm2 runs on it, but you > wouldn't want to do any actual work on it. Upgrading it to 256MB with > Debian + X + fvwm2 makes a decent machine for somebody who does nothing > but web browsing without video and email. This information is about 6 > months to a year old, and I think it involved a Debian 7.X OS.
Yeah, I wouldn't want to run anything graphical with less main memory than a cheap on-board video card offers VRAM :) Good to know that 256MB is viable for basic work, but I'm really glad I'm not trying to run VLC in 256MB. >> I have a video-playing laptop (drives a TV via S-Video) >> with 1.5GB RAM. Granted, I couldn't go CLI only there, but in the end, >> rather than trying to manually cut Debian down to fit inside that RAM >> while still leaving enough to play videos (including scaling them up >> or down to fit the screen), > > That's a much bigger challenge than what I was doing. It sure is. Without any hardware changes, I've made it so we can watch much higher-bitrate movies on the new Yosemite than we could on the old one, running Windows XP (and still VLC). But there's still a limit, and we get glitchy playback on even 720p movies sometimes. I'm guessing something's having to scale them down to the resolution of S-Video, and either the RAM or the CPU (single core Pentium M 1600MHz) is getting bottlenecked at that. (Interestingly, one of my original fears has turned out to be completely unfounded: the commodity hard drive in the disk server is easily capable of handling several concurrent playbacks without anyone getting stuck.) It seems that AntiX gave me IceWM 1.3.7, which is definitely one of the lighter options. Whether simply installing IceWM on a vanilla Debian system would have been sufficient or not, I don't know, which is why I'm happy to let someone else make those decisions :) ChrisA -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/CAPTjJmq4tUo+Xt=Aan97Xd=qcN3dUO4Q=syo9tqm-rq3m3b...@mail.gmail.com
