Hi folks,
I have an oldish laptop with only 128M RAM. It's been running
Debian unstable for a LONG time. But it's been getting slower and
slower.
The reason for this is the gradually increasing size of the various
apps I run --- basically, X, xterm, bash, vi, LaTeX, and opera or
mozilla. On my other machines I use Emacs or Xemacs extensively; I've
never done that on this one. I use WindowMaker as window manager, it
takes only 7M or so nowadays. Even that's a bit more than I'd like.
X now takes 219M of virtual memory (most of which swaps in and out,
constantly). opera is OK on straight HTML pages, but for something
like facebook it grows and grows -- mozilla does the same -- and
eventually OOMs.
Does anyone have suggestions for a low-memory setup?
When I first ran Linux I had 1M of real memory. I later expanded that
to 4M so I could run X. This was back when the kernel version was 0.95 or
so.
When I first started using Unix (1979), we were on a PDP11-70 with 32
to 64 simultaneous users --- with 256k of real memory. I'm still
doing the same sorts of tasks: reading and writing email and news;
writing and typesetting documents, and programming. My *mobile*
*phone* has more grunt than that machine --- let alone my laptop, even
the old one I've been describing.
I suspect there's a lot of bloat in there somewhere.
Peter C
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