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Romantic Infection

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Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2008 8:01 am

okay i just got an old s**t computer that's the first of my very own, and would love to put linux on it ,since well anything is better than windows 95, the problem is it only has 16MB RAM. is there a linux that can run off it?

Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2008 11:20 am

Well there is a Linux distro that can easily handle that but it does not have a GUI, Monkey Linux only needs 4 MB or RAM and 30 MB of hard drive space, but it uses older smaller versions of programs. If you can spare enough HDD space to build up a SWAP partition that will give you 128 MB + of RAM then we can move up to the "bigger" distros that have a GUI.

vendion Gear
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vendion Gear
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Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2008 3:18 pm

vendion

Well there is a Linux distro that can easily handle that but it does not have a GUI, Monkey Linux only needs 4 MB or RAM and 30 MB of hard drive space, but it uses older smaller versions of programs. If you can spare enough HDD space to build up a SWAP partition that will give you 128 MB + of RAM then we can move up to the "bigger" distros that have a GUI.

*hits his head with his hand* Why did I forget this,

DSL's website

Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram

Run Damn Small Linux with dsl lowram and it should work with your 16 MB of RAM and still give you a GUI. I'm looking up information on Puppy Linux to see what it's minimal ram is and if it as a low ram mode as well.

Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2008 3:48 pm

Ok I just tested in a VM with exactly 16 MB of ram (no hdd) and no vm extensions used on my laptop's AMD processor (to not effect my test any) and using "dsl lowram" at the boot option screen worked, but X took a while to boot up ~10 minutes before icons starting appearing on the desktop. It will be slow but usable.

This test was done with the current stable release 4.4.4

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Romantic Infection

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Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2008 5:24 am

thanks for that it works fine a little slow but no slower than 95 did.

Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2008 7:31 am

Your welcome, and what can you expect for 16 MB or RAM in a world where 1 GB is barely enough RAM, speaking of course about vista.

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G.Warrior107

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Posted: Sun Sep 28, 2008 6:50 pm

vendion

Your welcome, and what can you expect for 16 MB or RAM in a world where 1 GB is barely enough RAM, speaking of course about vista.

You got it wrong, you need 2GB or it crashes...

Anyway, back to the point of this thread, this isn't exactly a low-memory idea but do you have any computer stores nearby? Availability of such places varies from town to town but I know in mine I've got a nice computer recycle store where you can get 2 sticks of 128MB for like $10 (or even less if you do some friendly haggling, though I wouldn't recommend it) so like at $5 per 128MB stick, you could easily get enough for things like DSL and stuff without having to run quite so low memory usage on it...

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EDIT
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Sorry to the post below by Vendion, are you sure that you've seen it run on what Microsoft thinks it will run on? I've only seen I think maybe one computer run it on less than 2 GB RAM without crashing all the time or significantly lagging or any of that junk.

Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2008 10:34 pm

G.Warrior107

vendion

Your welcome, and what can you expect for 16 MB or RAM in a world where 1 GB is barely enough RAM, speaking of course about vista.

You got it wrong, you need 2GB or it crashes...

Anyway, back to the point of this thread, this isn't exactly a low-memory idea but do you have any computer stores nearby? Availability of such places varies from town to town but I know in mine I've got a nice computer recycle store where you can get 2 sticks of 128MB for like $10 (or even less if you do some friendly haggling, though I wouldn't recommend it) so like at $5 per 128MB stick, you could easily get enough for things like DSL and stuff without having to run quite so low memory usage on it...

Vista basic has a minimum requirement of 512 MB but recommends 1 GB, premimum has a min of 1 GB recommends 2 GB. And nothing can stop if from crashing, like like the UserFriendly comic (which I could find it again) Person 1 "Did you hear SP1 will fix all of Vista's problems?"
Person 2 "I didn't know a service pack could fix bloating?"

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