[TriLUG] FW: Is it just me, or...

[Chris Hedemark]

On Wednesday 13 March 2002 04:29 pm, you wrote:
> Seriously, is that considered a low amount of memory for Linux? I guess by
> today's standards it is for any OS, eh? I've thought about upping the
> memory to 128 on this puppy, but the chips for this machine is WAY out of
> line $wise. And why is it laptop memory is so specific to  the machine it
> goes in? Never did understand that about laptops....

Just some recent experience with Red Hat 7.2 -

16MB or less - Won't install at all.
32MB - Installs but swaps like mad.
64MB - Installs and runs acceptably.
128MB - Installs and runs pretty well.  Anything more than this and swap 
disappears under most uses.

Earlier distros were definitely much more miserly with memory consumption.  
Red Hat 5.2 used to run pretty darned good with 16MB as I recall.

For low memory applications today I run OpenBSD which suffers less from 
feature bloat these days.  Not that feature bloat is a bad thing in and of 
itself, but certainly no good on low memory systems.

Today I had the pleasure of briefly running a dual 1.4GHz Athlon with 1GB of 
RAM and I couldn't make it sweat.  I tried doing some script fu in the GIMP 
that normally takes at least SOME time on my Duron 750 at home and on this 
box I almost missed it when I blinked.  Sadly that box had to be reloaded 
with Windows 2000 to go to its final destination but I have a feeling I'll be 
seeing more boxes like this soon with Linux on it.

Of course if your system can accept PC133 SDRAM it is pretty darned cheap 
these days to just pop in a 128MB upgrade and be done with it.  I was lucky 
enough to pick up 512MB a little while ago when it cost about $70.

-- 

Chris Hedemark
Yonder Way
http://yonderway.com