minimum RAM for Linux?

[TravisBickle]

can I do anything at all with Linux on a machine limited to 64MB? don't ask why only 64Mb... I also have a lot of integrated things to work on the board. imagine everything you can integrated and that's what it's like.

 

[PG]

That should be just fine. I recently installed RH7 on a 486 DX 66 with 64 MB of memory. It was extremely slow, but it ran without crashing.

 

[Zach]

"limited" to 64MB? That's not too bad if you're okay with slimming. You can use older distros too, redhat 5.x and 6.x ISO's are easy to find..

 

[gar598]

64mb is plenty, I have seen X work on a 486 with as little as 8 mb of ram. It all matters what you plan to use it for. What distro are you using???

 

[Soybomb]

Thats plenty, you might want to turn off the extra pretty window managers like enlightenment and go to blackbox or something small like that, but you'lll be more than fine.

 

[doug]

Well you can usually run a router and firewall for home with 16MB or less. The big hit is usually do you want to run a Graphical user interface (X) or is this just going to be a server and you will use command line on it.

 

[MGMorden]

I used to run KDE on an IDT C6 225mhz processor and 32mb of ram. 64mb is plenty.

 

[esung]

I used to have a linux box with 486DX-50 and 8MB of RAM, running slackware with no problem, even X. But like everyone stated, 64MB is enough for most tasks.

 

[TravisBickle]

wowee, looking good. actually I ram Windows 2000 with 56mb once well not really that cool, but it actually worked. just wondering how much resources I would have left after the windowing system (they say KDE is best)

 

[jartit]

I can attest to running with 64MB of RAM, that's why my system has now. It's also an AMD K6-2 266, pretty old technology. Anyway, I'm using Mandrake 7.1 with KDE. Running just KDE, gtop reports about 50 MB of RAM used with about 5 MB of swap. Running Netscape ups the total RAM usage to about 80MB. When I'm running a typical suite of programs (a few netscape windows, a couple terminal windows, text editor), I'm using around 100MB of RAM.

I also failed to mention that I'm also running Apache and MySQL on this computer, though only for development purposes, so that uses some RAM too.

Though the RAM usage seems bad, the performance isn't bad at all. It certainly runs better than Win98 does .