[ale] Mem. reqs. for RH9 (and other distros)

[Chris Ricker]

On Mon, 31 Mar 2003, Fulton Green wrote:

> But that's not the point of this note.  Instead, it's about the machine
> requirements:
>    http://www.RedHat.com/software/linux/technical/
> 
> Does anyone else find it interesting that even the *text* mode now
> requires up to 64 MB of RAM?
> 
> If anyone has any insight on this (that means you, Chris Ricker :), I'd
> love to hear it.  I can only guess that the new threading stuff bumped
> up the memory usage.

I don't know that I have special insight on it ;-). At any rate, my guess
would be that it's mainly due to how anaconda (RH installer) does batch RPM
installs -- batched rpm installs take memory (amount proportional to number
of packages being installed), and that's gotten worse with new rpm's
concurrent access feature

You can get alternate installers for RHL which do things in a
less-memory-intensive fashion. Check out RULE
<http://www.rule-project.org/en/index.php>. The slinky stuff should mostly
work for 9 now, or soon if not yet (though I wouldn't necessarily expect
miniconda to be ported to 9).

> Or, perhaps, RH8 also required 64 MB minimum, though I remember a time
> when RHL only req'd 32 MB.

8 could install in 32 megs, with a little luck. RULE made it consistently do 
so (and also gave you the ability to install on < 586)....

Red Hat's requirements are only rough guidelines. You might be able to
install w/ less than 64 megs, particularly if you do a kickstart text-mode
install of Core only. I did a fresh install over the weekend on a 48-meg
machine, and it went okay, but that was a very minimal kickstart over
serial. On the other hand, I know some of the beta testers tried rhl9 gold
last week with 32 megs, and quit after 24 hours of swapping rpm transactions
;-)

> I may just give this a go anyway on my *six*-year-old 90 MHz laptop with
> a sparse 24 MB of memory, but if the installation chokes, what would be
> a more "forgiving" distro?  I was thinking Slackware, but perhaps Debian
> can handle older machines like this as well.  I would imagine there are
> one or two other distros out there specifically tuned for this situation.

You'll definitely need something like RULE with that little memory.

Debian should still install with that little memory, as should slackware. 
They're also going to give you more options for use afterwards (X is 
actually usable with 32 megs if you use lighter-weight desktops / window 
managers than Gnome / KDE. RH doesn't come with any real options there, but 
other distros do still cater to that market).

Older distros would be another option for that machine. Linux used to run
well on that hardware, but glibc bloat, etc. have raised the requirements
for the current desktop-targetting distros.

later,
chris
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