Small footprint linux

[Jason Stephenson]

Derek Martin wrote:
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> On Mon, Jun 23, 2003 at 09:21:12AM -0400, Jason Stephenson wrote:
> 
>>Can you even get a working X in under 32 MB these days?
> 
> 
> Sure.
> 
> USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
> root      1531  1.3 10.6 30236 20420 ?       R    Jun21  28:57 X :0
> 
> Note the RSS (amount of memory in physical RAM) is 20MB.
> 
> 

Check it out. This is on FreeBSD 5.1, so YMMV.

   PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
   590 jason     96    0 73440K 65392K select  49:10  0.00%  0.00% 
mozilla-bin
   517 root      96    0 91564K 86956K select  19:52  0.00%  0.00% XFree86
   532 jason     96    0  4640K  3604K select   7:41  0.00%  0.00% blackbox
20036 jason     96    0 13052K 11192K select   1:58  0.00%  0.00% emacs

That's with a 64MB Radeon 7000 PCI with DRI enabled running at 1280x1024 
at 16 bpp. It's nice having 1 GB of RAM, as you can see here:

Mem: 126M Active, 533M Inact, 118M Wired, 33M Cache, 111M Buf, 190M Free
Swap: 2027M Total, 2027M Free

FreeBSD automatically does 2x RAM as swap, unless you manually configure 
your swap partition at install. I usually go with this default, but on 
this machine, I've never used any swap.

As it turns out, my first instinct was correct and the original poster 
was asking about disk space. I'm afraid that I won't be very helpful in 
getting X to work on such a small amount of disk space. I've not done it 
before, so have no pointers or tips. The smallest Linux install I ever 
did was Slackware 4 minimal install with no X. Got a working system in 
less than 72 MB. (To me, a working system includes compilers, headers 
and certain libraries. I'm a programmer, before and after all.)