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Tiny Core Linux 13 Released: Needs Just 46MB of RAM, 50MB of Disk
- Koshkin 5y agoJust wanted to note that at the time Linux appeared back in the 90's, 46MB would have been an insanely large amount of RAM. (And so it still is today in the majority of embedded situations.)
- daveslash 5y agoAgreed. Nice perspective. Our first home computer was a Windows 3.1 machine, which had 16MB of RAM IIRC... Even if I recall incorrectly, it definitely wasn't 48Megs.
- hulitu 5y agoI had a friend with Cyrix 6x86 MMX which had 32 MB of RAM.
- bluedino 5y agoThat was a large amount of memory for a Windows 3.1 machine. 8MB systems were still common in the 95/98 days.
- daveslash 5y agoYou may be right... it may have been only 8. It was a while ago (obviously) and I was a kid who didn't really commit these things to memory very well. I do remember that we had to open up SYSTEM.INI in notepad and comment out some of the Windows internals and reboot the machine just to have enough ram to play Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.
- wang_li 5y agoUsed to boot Linux from a 1.2 MB 5 1/4" floppy with the kernel, network drivers, shell, and X Windows server on an i386 with 8 MB RAM. Made for a perfectly fine X terminal.
- icedchai 5y agoDefinitely. My first Linux box was a 386-SX/20 mhz with 3 megs of RAM (1 on the motherboard, 2 expansion.) Originally I was running Coherent, a closed-source Unix clone. By '97 or so, I had a whopping 32 megs on a Pentium 100.
- hulitu 5y agoCame here to say the same thing. You could run X with Netscape in 12 Megs of RAM.
- bjoli 5y agoI remember running X on Linux on a system with 20 megs of ram. I Wonder how much is bloat and how much is trading memory use for speed. And the obvious part of 64-bit Vs 32-bit...
- povkys 5y agoYep, I’ve used freesco linux which was installed on 1.44mb floppy. I’ve used it for routing internet for a few neighbors, to lower the cost of expensive dsl line.
- NackerHughes 5y agoCould you recommend a Linux distro that runs on computers with less than 46MB of RAM?
- anthk 5y agoAnd by late 90's 46MB would be so-so for Windows 98.
- throwawaymanbot 5y agoThis is awesome engineering. Efficiency should be more highly prized!
- anthk 5y agoDoes is still have the horrible dock? A plain FLWM or Fluxbox would be better.
- hulitu 5y agoYou can always use { c,v}tvm. Also fvwm is the best.
- anthk 5y agoA point: NetBSD would still run fine under a Pentium and 48-64MB of RAM once you make the kernel smaller.
- maxmalkav 5y agoIt does run, not even sure if you need to slim down the kernel (I managed to find 128MB of RAM for my P166, 3 years ago it was enough for the regular installer). It was nice to run modern software on it, it was an ok-ish terminal, the CPU struggled (a lot) with default SSH cryptography and the graphical mode was not of much use, but it supported the serial mouse, which is nice
- prirun 5y agoIn the early 80's, I worked for our local school district on Prime minicomputers. They supported something like 64 terminal users (up to 96 at one point), payroll, budgeting, student records, 2 simultaneous computer science labs of maybe 15 terminals each (a "port selector" allowed hooking up 96 lines on the terminal side and 32 or something on the computer side), the programming staff (around 8), 2 line printers running all day/evening, and had less than 8MB of RAM in the system - a Prime 4050 at the end. For disk storage, we had a 600MB, 300MB, and 770MB drive to store all the data above and daily attendance records for every high school kid. This machine ran COBOL, Fortran, PL/I, Basic, source-level debugger, and Emacs with a Multics-style paged + segmented architecture. Not saying it was all super-fast, and we did have to manage resources. For example, large payroll or budgeting jobs ran out of a batch queue, they had lower priority than terminals, etc. But in hindsight it seems rather amazing what got done on an 8MB system.
- em3rgent0rdr 5y agoWorth noting that chromium & firefox are in the packages list [1]. [1] http://tinycorelinux.net/13.x/x86_64/tcz/ http://tinycorelinux.net/13.x/x86_64/tcz/
- hulitu 5y agoTBH i don't think they will fit in 50 MB disk space.
- marttt 5y agoThis has been my go-to distro on an old Thinkpad T42 for several years. Loaded packages are listed line-by-line in a single file (onboot.lst), so it's really easy to return to a clean system when needed -- just by deleting the lines with unwanted extensions. This is probably my most favorite feature of TC. I usually just boot with a few essential extensions (wifi, framebuffer device, text editor etc) and load additional packages later, only in case they are needed. The Corebook gives a great overview of the system: http://tinycorelinux.net/book.html http://tinycorelinux.net/book.html