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Re: Wanted to build: bare minimum Debian system



On Fri, 2003-07-25 at 15:55, Kirk Strauser wrote:
> At 2003-07-25T03:16:19Z, Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> writes:
> 
> > Hope you've got 192MB swap (16x RAM).
> 
> Actually, I have 512MB swap (the drive was migrated from a Webplayer that
> I'd hacked).
> 
> > Imagine how fast that, say, "apt-get update" is going to be.
> 
> You can't.  Really.  It's that bad.
> 
> > Maybe with an XFree 3.3.6 and twm.
> 
> *Thin* client.  As in, *no* clients running locally.
> 
> >> Is the 2.2.x series significantly smaller?
> 
> > Yes.
> 
> Good.  That's a nice starting point.
> 
> >> Is Debian even reasonable on this tiny box, or should I be looking at a
> >> slimmer distribution?  If so, any suggestions?
> 
> > Slink may be more appropriate.
> 
> Mmmm....  I'd rather use somewhat-new-but-very-little than
> ancient-but-small.
> 
> > That's a joke, right?  How about Evo and Pan while you're at it?
> 
> That's the idea.

mozilla takes about 24M with nothing loaded and evolution somewhere
around 22M. They are both serious memory hoggers so you can mostly
forget about running them localy. Maybe if you run them remote since you
said you only wanted it as an X terminal (I am not refering to an
xterm), no local window manager or programs (x --querry <host>). Its
pushing it, and I don't know how much memory it would take but maybe ...
As a command line, look into running busybox instead of the regular bash
etc, and skip the getty for login.
You could try and run the X terminal standalone with no command line to
save some memory.
a 2.2 kernel completly stripped could work. I worked with a mixed
2.2/2.4 embeded kernel and it did start up at around 1 or 2 megs ram
with busybox as a command line (don't remember exactly), a custom
inittab etc, but it takes a lot of work. Also look at the strip kernel
options for embeded kernels for 2.6. I don't know how much memory it
saves though.
You should look at something in the embeded direction, I think debian
has something in that direction but I don't know. I takes a lot of
configuration if you are up for, and still I really doubt that you will
be able to do much usefull work localy since vim alone takes around 3 M,
gvim 4.5M.



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