Re: Running Debian with only 213MB Ram?
On 24/05/15 00:47, Rodolfo Medina wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> On my old laptop I chose Openobex as window manager because Gnome is too heavy
> for it. I get though:
>
> $ free -m
> total used free shared buffers cached
> Mem: 213 207 5 4 23 111
> -/+ buffers/cache: 73 140
> Swap: 952 0 952
>
> with just Openobex and Emacs and a couple of terminal emulators running, not
> else. Do you think that is too little? Then maybe I should gave up hoping to
> use Debian on that machine, and look for - if any exists - other systems?
My advice: don't try running Firefox (aka Iceweasel) on it. I have an
old Pentium II 300MHz machine with 160MB RAM that I once used to use as
a main workhorse at uni (in the era of Windows Vista, so old even then).
Back then it was a usable workhorse. The only thing it struggled with
was YouTube, and thankfully there was youtube-dl: mplayer could play the
videos just fine, just Adobe Flash struggled. It was never a speed
demon, but it was tolerable with some patience.
This was running Gentoo Linux as the OS. Initially I ran KDE as the
window environment, then found that got too heavy and switched to FVWM.
Recently I resurrected the machine, put on a newer release of Gentoo and
got it going monitoring AX.25 packet radio. It works fine for that, and
can run Xastir for an APRS digipeater without issue.
I tried putting Firefox 35 on. Big mistake.
It runs, but until you do some low memory tweaks, it'll thrash the swap
and get nowhere. Even after tweaks, it's slower than a 5-day Ashes
test. I had thought it'd be useful for checking on the weather radar
before I began my commute to work of a morning, but have since given up
on the idea.
I'm not sure if Chromium performs better on low RAM, but modern
applications seem to assume at least 512MB RAM these days.
Regards,
--
Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter, VK4MSL)
I haven't lost my mind...
...it's backed up on a tape somewhere.
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