Next Question: Is it my lousy gerbil-powered computer?

Daniel Robitaille robitaille at gmail.com
Sun May 15 00:30:30 UTC 2005


> If it matters, the aforesaid Gerbil XX1000 has 2.1 G hard drive, a
> blinding 48 MB of RAM, and a dazzling 166mHz chip.
> 

the 2.1Gbytes drive could be a problem.    If you do an install with
really a minimal set of packages, it is feasible, but it will be some
work.  For reference my /usr directory contains 2.6 GB of files to
start; and I haven't installed  a ton of packages beside the defaults
ones for Hoary. Add to that /home, /etc /var , etc, and you can see
that 2.1 is quite tight.

48 MB of ram WILL be a problem.  I don't think X can even run in that
small memory.  Actually, it could run, but you will swap to disk
continously and performance will be miserable.  The lowest I went to
in recent years was 96MB (for a Fedora Core 1 machine with Gnome and
KDE), and the experience was not that good.  Just the OS without
running applications was in the 90-110 MB range; add Firefox, a couple
of xterm, and the thing was usable but slow.  Changing windows manager
to PAWM (http://www.pleyades.net/pawm/) was a great inprovement, but
still it was still very limiting at 96MB.

Sadly I have to say that you're probably  better of with the older
Win98 on that hardware than Ubuntu/Linux.   That's the advantage of a
7-year old Operating System :)  (unless you decide to run in console
mode only; then Linux will probably work quite well, but the number of
applications is limited, and it is not that great visually for the
users)
 

There was a project out there (based on Fedora?) to run Linux on small
memory machines (mainly for developping countries), but I can't
remember the name right now.




More information about the ubuntu-users mailing list