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.
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