On Mon, Jan 10, 2005 at 09:49:42AM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote: > On Mon, Jan 10, 2005 at 07:49:19AM +0000, Jon Masters wrote: > > Bah. So I actually have to physically put more RAM in to the machine > > just to have an old test box for kernels? Great. Time was when I > > If you _can_ add more RAM to it, you won't regret doing so. > > > actually used RH at home that it didn't complain so much with 32MB of > > system RAM - I'm not ranting though, just reminiscing. > > Yeah, but on the plus side: <http://www.jcmit.com/mem2002.htm> If you want to run Fedora on tiny ram you are sort of going up the down staircase. Since all things are not virtual the size of the kernel and the various necessary data structures add up and will not swap. One important road block is the ramdisk that is used in the boot process to tidy up. Another is the size of the kernel, drivers, system stack, heap, etc. Each time someone adds a new file system type or some interesting display driver the baseline demand on DRAM grows. It is sort of sad in a nostalgic way that 32MB is not enough. My memory escapes me but I believe that this is more than Unix was invented on. I too, have an old boat anchor (laptop) that does not boot from a CDROM and has only 32MB of DRAM... so I guess it will continue to run Win95. I would be running a 'frozen' root file system off a CDROM on it if it would boot from a CDROM. The FreeBSD folks do have some tiny unices worth looking into. One boots and runs from a floppy/ CDROM and makes a good firewall. The Fedora/Linux .vs. *BSD projects compliment each other. They seem to be giving attention to different goals in ways that I find refreshing. -- T o m M i t c h e l l spam unwanted email. SPAM, good eats, and a trademark of Hormel Foods.
