On Sat, Jul 04, 2009, [email protected] wrote:

> Does anyone have suggestions for a low-memory setup?

As far as web browsing goes, you're stuck. There's no money to be made
working on low footprint browsers and noone in the academic/open source
community has picked up on the handful of fledgling, lightweight browsers
and updated the rendering models to cope with modern stuff.

X windows is increasingly suffering from the same issue. There's plenty
of abstraction layers between the application itself and the rendering
engine(s), a lot of them assume computers with accelerated hardware
and/or fast memory to video display busses. Throw the same code on
something with an ISA-era graphics card and you can -watch- things draw.

> 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.

Welcome to 2009. :) It is only going to get worse.



Adrian

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