On 15/2/20 6:43 pm, Dumitru Moldovan wrote: > Not really, about 21 years ago I was learning to get XFree86 working, > to break free from the console on a desktop with 24MB of RAM.
It's all relative… I can recall years ago experimenting with operating systems on old machines (even by that day's standards)… trying to get Slackware Linux running in 4MB RAM. Today, I'm trying to cram stuff into 32kB of RAM and thinking how 4MB and a MMU would be luxury! (Even RetroBSD needs 128kB.) I'm sure someone on here will tell me how they used to flip switches on a front panel to fill the whopping 128 bytes of RAM on their 8080 with machine code whilst dreaming of a punched tape loader and a few more DRAM chips. I would suggest any "modern" multi-tasking general purpose OS such as OpenBSD, Linux, etc, you're looking at a minimum of 256MB RAM. In the future, probably consider doubling that… and again. I have an old PII 300MHz laptop with 160MB RAM, and while it boots Linux just fine (I had it running Gentoo doing AX.25 packet radio stuff), firing up a web browser (Firefox) to check the weather is unusably slow. I could throw OpenBSD on it, but not sure that would really make much difference: kernel re-linking is going to be painful on that machine. Sometimes it's better to realise when something has past its prime. -- Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter, VK4MSL) I haven't lost my mind... ...it's backed up on a tape somewhere.
