livecd memory requirements

[Jani Monoses]

Hello,

contrary to what we advertise the liveCD does not work well on 128M machines.
The panel is not there in the default desktop (since edgy at least) and ubiquity
has no chances of finishing.
This can be alleviated by using swap, but on machines where there was no linux previously
there are no swap partitions.
Bugs 

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/105971
and
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xubuntu-meta/+bug/70561
are related to this.

Since we are unlikely to be able to fix this for feisty at least we could give more accurate
minimal memory requirements.
I'd like to ask any of you (more preferably) that as you test liveCD's try to figure out this
minimum amount as well.
It would preferably be done on a fast and resourceful machine, but by passing mem=128m as a boot paramater to the kernel.
Then 256, 192 binary searc or whatever amounts you think until you find that the panel is there in the default desktop screen

For the more adventurous, you could kill gdm stop some of the init scrips (hplip is a major offender as it launches python and it
uses at least 5M,or cupsys, etc) restart and see if the panel has made it.

The changes that lead to this are almost all related to the base ubuntu system (hplip, system-tools-backends), what did indeed grow
between dapper and edgy is the addition of the trash applet to the panel, which is an external process.

if you do test, please report any findings. These can be done in vmware as well.

thanks
Jani