On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 9:12 AM, Brian <a...@cityscape.co.uk> wrote: > On Fri 30 May 2014 at 03:00:21 +1000, Chris Angelico 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? 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, > > Surely you are not saying 1.5GB is "RAM-starved" for playing video? The > machines here manage with less.
No no, I was thinking more of <1GB as "starved". Even for rescaling video on the fly (as often happens - the files come at whatever resolution they're at, and they're all played in full-screen mode), 1.5GB isn't bad. But if you have just 1GB, or 768MB, or 256MB, or whatever figure, can you still run a default Debian? How low can you go, without fiddling around enormously? > If you had only 1 GB of disk space to play with you might try harder. X > and vlc in about 500 MB is possible. Memory? The existing 1 GB doesn't > seem to limit video playback. The limitation lies in the CPU and video > chip. No 1080p video for me, I'm sorry to say ; the software is impotent > to change that. Really? Disk space has never seemed much of a problem - I've live-booted a variety of Linuxes on the same hardware, so the "disk" space is somewhere between the 700-odd meg of the CD and the 1.5GB of RAM, depending on how much it takes over. I was fully expecting the bottlenecks to be the network (or, to be more precise, the disk at the other end of the network - the 100Mb NIC can easily supply video), the CPU, and main memory. >> or down to fit the screen), I ended up installing AntiX, which seems >> to have done all the work for me already. It's Debian-derived, so all > > What work has it done? It needs 2.5 GB of disk space and has two or > three WM's and a couple of file managers. Plus libreoffice. I think > AntiX is quite a nice distro but do you need all of this to play a > video? It's a bit more than just playing videos; it's a set of related tools for managing them, controlling playback remotely, etc. Not huge, and I'm sure I could create a massively cut-down system (is it possible to run VLC on top of X without a window manager??) and fit the same tasks into far less memory and a far less powerful CPU, but that would require a lot more fiddling. > Oh, and vlc has to be installed because it doesn't come with it! Talk > about faffing around when you could just build (not "cut down") a > dedicated Debian machine which performs just as well. Hmm, not sure that default Debian performs as well. My first Linification of that hardware was with Debian Jessie as of whenever it was I did it (earlier this year sometime), running Xfce with all the defaults. Playback, while immensely smoother than it had been under Windows, still glitched fairly often on largeish files. Now, with AntiX, the glitching is only on the highest of bit-rates, again with basically all the defaults, so I'd say there is a performance difference between the two. What the cause of that difference is, though, I can't say. 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/captjjmr0tkg7j9zz-cmzudldhrsjdggq-venyxxmbywg11u...@mail.gmail.com
