[Gllug] Linux distro for small memory system

[Richard Cohen]

On 30/10/06, Christopher Hunter <chrisehunter at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> On Sunday 29 Oct 2006 22:12, Richard Jones wrote:
> > Has anyone any thoughts on a suitable Linux distro for a relatively
> > small memory laptop (64 MB of RAM, but nice 650 MHz processor)?
> > It has to be usable by someone with little computing experience - this
> > is an upgrade from Windows ME (!)
> >
> > I've been following a couple of "how to install Ubuntu on low memory
> > systems" guides[1][2], but I'm not getting very far as they seem to be
> > quite outdated.
> >
> > Rich.
>
> DSL - Damn Small Linux - will probably fit the bill, but even that might be
> slow.  Can't you get a bit more memory for the box?
>
> Chris

Okay, I've ranted about this here before, and I'm sure I will again...

There is a fascination within the community with repurposing old
hardware - old, *obselete* hardware.  A machine with 64MB of RAM is
perfectly capable of running as a headless - or at least X-less -
machine, but it's simply not suitable for use as an interactive
graphical desktop machine, running anything like current software.
Yes, you can pare it down, but you'll end up with something
significantly less functional (if more stable and secure) than WinME.
In fact, you have the choice of installing something more than, say, 3
years old, and getting it at a vaguely usable speed (meaning it'll
only thrash itself to death if you try to run more than one program at
once - multitasking, what's that?) , or something less than 3 years
old which will run embarrassingly slowly.

This is not a dig at the OP - as I said, I've done this rant before -
but a general problem.  We can take these old boxes and rescue them
from dumping to use as fileservers, gateways, firewalls, etc. but we
cannot and should not be attempting to replace the existing Windows
installations with, at best, an equally useless Linux system.

Yes, you can put DSL on it, and it'll still thrash, and it'll be a lot
less dumb-user-friendly than WinME.  Don't do it. The OLPC machine,
whatever they're calling it this week, is specced with a 366MHz
processor and 128MB of RAM - and there's heavy work going on shrinking
their standard software set so it fits in that space.  On any machine,
running beyond spec will show up one particular bottleneck, and in
your case, even if you had a multi-core multi-GHz processor, once you
run out of RAM it would run like a 5-year-old machine - there's no
point having a powerful processor if it's permanently waiting around
for data to swap in from disk.  Not to mention that it's probably got
a slow disk, being an old laptop...

Cheers
Richard
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