On 2020-03-11 00:13, Stuart Longland wrote:
On 15/2/20 6:43 pm, Dumitru Moldovan wrote:
Not really, about 21 years ago I was learning to get XFree86 working,
to break free from the console on a desktop with 24MB of RAM.
It's all relative… I can recall years ago experimenting with operating
systems on old machines (even by that day's standards)… trying to get
Slackware Linux running in 4MB RAM.
Today, I'm trying to cram stuff into 32kB of RAM and thinking how 4MB
and a MMU would be luxury! (Even RetroBSD needs 128kB.)
I'm sure someone on here will tell me how they used to flip switches on
a front panel to fill the whopping 128 bytes of RAM on their 8080 with
machine code whilst dreaming of a punched tape loader and a few more
DRAM chips.
I would suggest any "modern" multi-tasking general purpose OS such as
OpenBSD, Linux, etc, you're looking at a minimum of 256MB RAM. In the
future, probably consider doubling that… and again.
I have an old PII 300MHz laptop with 160MB RAM, and while it boots Linux
just fine (I had it running Gentoo doing AX.25 packet radio stuff),
firing up a web browser (Firefox) to check the weather is unusably slow.
I could throw OpenBSD on it, but not sure that would really make much
difference: kernel re-linking is going to be painful on that machine.
Sometimes it's better to realise when something has past its prime.
A year or two ago I had OpenBSD working on my iBook with 64MB of RAM,
even got FVWM working on it. For fun and testing purposes, I ran some
small OpenBSD virtual machines with 64MB RAM as well. A few years back I
got OpenBSD to boot with 32MB, but it wasn't particularly usable. I've
found 128MB to be usable for basic terminal work, but you're definitely
correct about 256MB being the bare minimum for anything fancy or GUI
related.
