On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 11:51:47AM -0500, Oscar Medina wrote: > I have an old 386 PC with 8 MB RAM and 250 MB HD. I would like to reuse > this PC, installing Linux on it. > > However, common Linux distributions needs more RAM I have. Does anyone > realized this process before. Could you help me?
What in your mind is "Linux"? To get the kernel--even a very new kernel--to boot in 8 megs and leave a very significant fraction of RAM available for user programs, is quite possible. Embedded machines running with far less "disk" space (or no non-volatile storage at all) are common. Embedded machines running with that little RAM are less common, but they do exist. But embedded machines are very limited in what they try to do. What do you want to do? If you pretend you ae building an embedded machines and start with a kernel and carefully add the specific lean bits you want you could accomplish a lot. (If you can boot strap up to running to begin with.) But if you want to run any programs that are graphical and even vaguely new you are going to be seriously hurting. Fighting with X and getting a light-weight windowing system up would be possible in so little RAM, but then what? Most of the interesting development of applications has been developed by people with far more RAM, and so will require lots of RAM. Even applications intended for PDAs like the Zarus will be tight--a handheld Zarus has 4-times as much RAM as you do, in addition to 64-Mbytes of flash. If you want to run text-based programs and server software there will be a lot to chose from, however, you still can overstress your capacity. For example, I am subscribe to some high volume mailing lists, and though I use a text-based mail program (mutt), my mail file is over 100 MB right now. (I am behind, that is why I am so late in writing this.) Your little machine will not be able to handle such large tasks, even in pure text. In contrast, if you keep your tasks to, say, 15-year old sizes, you can do real work in such a small machine. The Linux kernel itself is still small. And you will learn a lot. But as others have said, getting a discarded machine with 4- or 8-times the memory would be a lot less work for you. -kb -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
