[Gllug] Linux distro for small memory system

[Richard Jones]

On Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 03:21:46PM +0800, Richard Cohen wrote:
> 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.

Richard, you are right: It has been brought home to me all the more by
trying to get this laptop (actually two laptops) working again.

Unfortunately this means that there is _no_ suitable operating system
for these two laptops, since I cannot in good conscience install
Windows 9x/ME on to them.

Are these laptops therefore obsolete, and suitable only for landfill?
We cannot go on for too long disposing of laptops which were brand new
only six years ago.

There seem to be three possible ways out of this mess.  (1) Take
something like Damn Small Linux and actually put a decent shell around
it, rename the applications "Word Processor", "Web", etc.  instead of
the unfamiliar codenames, replace the window manager with something a
tad more intuitive, etc.  (2) Take an old but reasonable Linux distro
and put it back into maintenance mode, fixing all the security holes.

Those sounds like a lot of work for little gain ...

How about a better plan: (3) Get some decent tools together for
measuring _real_ resource usage of programs, and NAME AND SHAME the
sets of applications which are the worst offenders.

A lot of the problem is the ever present "top" command.  Unfortunately
"top" does _not_ give an accurate representation of the total
resources used by an application (let alone set of applications such
as "the GNOME desktop").  For example, we wrote some analysis tools
which top reports as using 40 GB of RAM - in fact they mmap a single
huge file and then use tiny bits of it.  They are not resource hungry.
On the other hand an application which forgets about its pixmaps
inside the X server can look quite slimline, when in fact it's a major
offender.

I think Dan Berrage has been writing/using some such tools for the One
Laptop Per Child project ...  What's really needed is something as
easy and ubiquitous as "top", but accurate.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
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