5 ms·

There's no way youre using a modern linux distro here. Even something like puppylinux which is designed for "old" computers expects around 256mb of ram. 72mb o

There's no way youre using a modern linux distro here. Even something like puppylinux which is designed for "old" computers expects around 256mb of ram. 72mb of ram doesn't get you much nowadays. Maybe you can install Damn Small Linux and get some basic functionality. Someone on /r/sysadmin tried reviving an old 486 laptop recently and I believe he could only get DSL to work, but had significant driver problems. I think he had much less ram, like 16mb or so. 72mb of ram probably get away with NT 4.0 easily and maybe even Windows 2000 or even XP, though I'm not sure how usable XP would be even if it did boot. edit: I found someone running puppy on 64meg of ram. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6RmiXoSZaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6RmiXoSZaI

gtk40 11y ago
I've run Puppy on <128mb of RAM, although not recently. You probably would have to use Dillo or Links as a web browser instead of a Mozilla based browser.
xhrpost 11y ago
If you ditch the GUI you can go pretty low. VPS advocates used to see it as a challenge to reduce RAM usage. Here's one going down to 4mb https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/309202/#Comment_309202 https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/309202/#Commen...
antongribok 11y ago
Man I used to play a lot with Puppy and DSL, brings back some fond memories. Just for fun, I spun up an Ubuntu Trusty VM in VirtualBox with 64 MB of RAM and it works just fine (after uninstalling Puppet and Chef). $ free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 47 44 3 0 1 9 -/+ buffers/cache: 32 15 Swap: 0 0 0 $
yuhong 11y ago
XP won't boot at all.
antod 11y ago
> 72mb of ram probably get away with NT 4.0 easily Very easily - we used to have lots of 32MB NT4 machines. I think the system requirements were only 12 or 16MB (as usual wishful thinking really). Although I think the eventual resource usage of SP6 was a lot higher than the RTM version. > and maybe even Windows 2000 I tried Win2K Pro on a 486DX2 66 with 64MB once - it worked but was very very slow. I suspect the cpu and disk were a bigger factor than the amount of ram.

gtk40 11y ago

I've run Puppy on <128mb of RAM, although not recently. You probably would have to use Dillo or Links as a web browser instead of a Mozilla based browser.

xhrpost 11y ago

If you ditch the GUI you can go pretty low. VPS advocates used to see it as a challenge to reduce RAM usage. Here's one going down to 4mb https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/309202/#Comment_309202 https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/309202/#Commen...

antongribok 11y ago

Man I used to play a lot with Puppy and DSL, brings back some fond memories. Just for fun, I spun up an Ubuntu Trusty VM in VirtualBox with 64 MB of RAM and it works just fine (after uninstalling Puppet and Chef). $ free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 47 44 3 0 1 9 -/+ buffers/cache: 32 15 Swap: 0 0 0 $

yuhong 11y ago

XP won't boot at all.

antod 11y ago

> 72mb of ram probably get away with NT 4.0 easily Very easily - we used to have lots of 32MB NT4 machines. I think the system requirements were only 12 or 16MB (as usual wishful thinking really). Although I think the eventual resource usage of SP6 was a lot higher than the RTM version. > and maybe even Windows 2000 I tried Win2K Pro on a 486DX2 66 with 64MB once - it worked but was very very slow. I suspect the cpu and disk were a bigger factor than the amount of ram.