Comment by cmrdporcupine
5 years ago
I remember when I could (and did) run Linux on a 486 with 8MB of RAM and 200MB of HD. Ran X11, fvwm, emacs, Netscape. It used to be possible. These things were done in the 90s :-)
5 years ago
I remember when I could (and did) run Linux on a 486 with 8MB of RAM and 200MB of HD. Ran X11, fvwm, emacs, Netscape. It used to be possible. These things were done in the 90s :-)
fvwm is still updated, and it still consumes very few resources. Apart from Netscape, nothing is stopping you from recreating that experience, heh.
For anyone interested in trying, remember to cut down your kernel. The default kernel on my (64 bit, granted) laptop is 12MB, compressed, without any modules.
NetBSD is a bit easier to run on 8MB systems these days. Still not super easy, but less fat to trim off. I think you might still need to trim down the default kernel, but at least there is a premade config for that (GENERIC_TINY)
If you're daring, it should work on 4 MB machines... ;)
> remember to cut down your kernel.
yes, my Linux kernel is 3.4M, bz2 compressed. Unfortunately, some things are no more possible to get removed from the kernel, like the xattr in ext4.
How big will the kernel be in a distro like Ubuntu with all the modules?
The modern NetBSD kernel is is over 30MB and around 10 to 13 MB compressed in size on i386 and x86_64. So idk were you are getting its going to run in 8MB of memory without major swap slowdowns if it boots at all.
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Dillo still exists, if you want a fast, lightweight browser with only vaguely 90s rendering capabilities.
8 MB (and constantly swapping)
Generally Not Used Except by Middle Aged Computer Scientists.
Indeed, my first desktop with GNU/Linux (Slackware 2.0) run on a similar configuration, just with one of the first Pentiums.
That exact setup, except s/emacs/vim, was my setup starting in 1996. Wow, 25 years ago.
I think even 4MB was possible back then
I got my start on Linux with a 386 that had 4mb of ram, but it did not run X11.