Small footprint linux

[Jason Stephenson]

brian wrote:
[Deletia]
> I'm not sure if you can run a window manager in less than 32MB, the
> original post was sort of my lazy way of finding out :)
> 
[Deleted where he quotes me.]
 >
> That is my worry, is that I won't be able to get any sort of a desktop,
> which I would kind of really like to have...

Well, X will run in 32MB of RAM, but you'll want a decent amount of 
swap. Say, 4x RAM as a minimum. Thing about Linux and FreeBSD is they 
will use more RAM if it's available, if not, they'll happily chug along 
with less. Your system will appear to run slowly, slower than your 
processor speed might suggest that it should.

If you really want to try this, I'd suggest running XFree86 3, if it 
supports your video card, and try a small window manager, like EvilWM, 
or Black Box (though Black Box is no longer as small as it used to be).

I definitely would not try running Gnome or KDE on such a system, or 
Mozilla, or much of anything that's really useful. Looking at top and 
what I have running on my system, Emacs is one of the lighter weight 
applications coming in at about 12MB of RAM. (OK, so I'm spoiled. I have 
1GB of RAM on my workstation.)

IF you can find it, I'd run an older distro on the machine in question, 
say Slackware 3 or 4 or RH 4.x or 5.x. Trouble won't be finding the 
disks but securing the box since patches might no longer be available 
for those distros, and updating apps from source on a system of that 
vintage can be tricky (library incompatibilities).