Davej said:
It used to be said that Linux was good for any old boat anchor you had
lying around. Is that still true? Are there bad hardware choices? What
about old laptops? I need to get Ubuntu up and running with ethernet
and USB. Thanks!
There are 500 distros, all with different resource requirements. Ubuntu
is only one of those.
I'd want a 512MB machine as a minimum for Ubuntu, so I could run Xwindows.
If you drop to command prompt and work there, with X disabled, the
resource usage should be lower.
Right now, I have a Ubuntu 10.10 VM running on my WinXP machine (via
VirtualPC). If I do the following as root:
echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
that flushes the memory caches. In Ubuntu in particular, to become
real root to run the command, you do
sudo su root
and enter your password. That drop_caches command only runs as real root.
After your real root session is finished, you can return to the regular user
account by using "exit" in the shell.
By doing that, and using the "top" command, it says I'm currently
using 210MB of memory. So a 512MB machine leaves enough room to
run a web browser. If I open Firefox and go to a news site, the
memory usage jumps to 315MB. So the browser needed around 105MB.
So you can see why 512MB is a reasonable number, while 384MB (3*128)
would also work.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have distros like this. But
as near as I can tell, this isn't a general purpose distro. But it
does allow building something with a pretty small footprint.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Core_Linux
You can also find things like Damn Small Linux (DSL). Each of these
distros, will have a quirky appearance, to suit the needs of their
authors. And that is part of the price of having a small distro.
You also have the option of installing Gentoo (where everything is
built by you, custom). You can shave down the kernel, and add
just the packages you want with that. On my Core2 machine, it
might take ten to fifteen hours of compiling, to create all the
packages I use. Trimming down the kernel really saves time on
kernel builds (tossing all the optional support, LVM, RAID and
the like). And there are available recipes, to help you do
all of that. If you know a smattering of Linux commands, you
can follow that without too much problem. The only part I'm not
very good at yet, is cleaning up the mess six months later, when
it comes time to sync and update to the latest versions of all
software. The last time I did that, I got in such a mess, I
just reinstalled it again :-(
You can run Gentoo without XWindows. You could even remote
into the box, and do the XWindows display on a more capable
computer. Which gets you some value from the low end box. I
used to do that sort of thing a lot at work, being happy to be
given a low end Unix machine, and just stealing cycles from
my fellow employees
Telnet or SSH are ways of getting to
the other box - the nuisance with SSH, is carting around a
floppy with the key on it, which I've had to do a lot in the
past. It's one of the reasons I don't like the more secure
communications options - things like telnet have plenty of
exposures, but once set up, they don't have to be fiddled with
endlessly.
Paul
