Just how small can you go?

[Duncan Anderson]

Greetings

There have been a few threads lately which have raised the issue of 
installing Linux on old machines, and more specifically, what the 
minimal requirements would be for running Ubuntu.

Jeff Waugh, in one of the postings suggested a minimal configuration for 
running Ubuntu Linux smoothly. I quote,

"GNOME's performance issues are largely memory and disk related. It's not CPU
bound, so a slow machine won't hurt a lot, they just tend to have low memory
and slow disks.  :-) 

If you have 192-256MB RAM minimum, and reasonable disks (or use an NFS root)
you'll be fine."

That configuration is perfect, of course. What I should like to know, however, is what is the minimal hardware configuration for running Ubuntu? 

I have various machines with very small footprints running various flavours of Linux quite adequately. One of my clients is using a P1 133MHz with 16Mb RAM with RedHat 6.2. This client does not use the GUI, so there is no problem. Another client is using a P1 200MHz with 32Mb RAM with Mandrake 7.1 and KDE 1.1. As long as she does not have too many windows open, she is OK. She even runs Star Office 5.2! (Admittedly, she goes off to make herself a cup of tea waiting for Star Office to start up.) My wife is using Suse Linux 7.2 on a P1 133MHz with 48Mb RAM as a workstation at home. She is running WindowMaker. KDE and Gnome both went into swap. It does what she wants it to do, though, which is to access email and play MP3 files with gqmpeg.

I have Ubuntu installed on a P3 900MHz with 128Mb RAM, and there is no performance problem whatsoever with running the standard installation.

To repeat my question, what is the minimum RAM required to get Ubuntu to run, and will it run on a 486 or a P1? Obviously I am not talking about a full installation with all the bells and whistles.

regards
Duncan