In article <trussell.714780309@cwis> trussell@cwis.unomaha.edu (Tim Russell) writes:
quoted text
>    Sure.  I've seen posts from people running Linux with 2 M of ram even.

It is not a pretty sight.  I just installed Linux on a second machine, a
386SX-25 with 2 MB of RAM.  I have 880K free after the kernel is loaded,
and bash takes a huge chunk of that.  I can run kermit but not shell out
very often because I usually get a lot of "out of memory" errors.  (Swapping
doesn't seem to eliminate these error messages, maybe my "working set" is
too big to fit in 880K.)  When I *AM* able to run a command from within 
kermit, it is S-L-O-W.

I am getting ready to upgrade to 6 MB of RAM.  :-)  As for minimum
requirements for Linux, I suggest we recommend 3 or 4 MB of RAM.  For
X, I would say 6 MB.  4 MB wasn't enough to do much with, and 8 MB on my
386DX-33 was overkill for most of the stuff I was doing.  I don't
require more than 6 MB very often, but that's what swapping is for.  :-) 

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>As far as the 106 M drive, that's certainly enough to run a nice Linux system,
>I'm only using 160 M on my SCSI drives for Linux, and with X, two versions
>of GCC, Linux source, etc etc I still have over 90 M free.  My feeling so far
>is that 80-90 M would be enough disk space for most users unless you're
>running news or something.

I agree, 106 MB is plenty of disk space.  Unless you are going to keep a
lot of source code on your disk.  For binaries, a 64 MB Minix partition
is sufficient for me, and I have a lot of font files and other stuff.
On my SX, I have 8 MB swap and 55 MB Minix partitions and haven't run
into any problems.

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>    Depends on what your idea of "the complete Linux" is.  :-)  As I said,
>my system, except for news and TCP/IP, is a "complete linux", and I'm using
>3 M on my root partition and 55 M on my usr partition with a bunch of junk
>sitting around.

Another pack rat?  :-)  I gave gave Linux another 64 MB partition on my
DX because I was too lazy to do some house cleaning.  Some of the stuff
hasn't been touched since April!

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>>    4).  What's the major fugures of Linux?  Doesn't it support X on 386sx ? 
>
>    Sure does.  It may be a bit sluggish on 4 M of ram, and you'll definitely
>want a swap partition, but it should work.

How about those Linuxers with 16-32 MB of RAM?  I haven't heard their
experiences.  I wonder if they ever managed to run out of memory, except
when compiling something big like Interviews.  :-)

-- 
Jim H.
*
* James L. Henrickson
* ujlh@sunyit.edu        "Some day I might have a real .signature!"