[lug] Linux Distr. Size (was: no fun with the sun)

[Michael J. Hammel]

Thus spoke Jeff Howell
> For my machine at home, I found even 64 to be "cramped". Didn't have enough
> memory for X, enlightenment, and Quake3 to run. Running quake3 while swapping
> is BAD! I got around that by running X without a window manager. I've 
> upgraded to 192M RAM and that is no longer an issue.

The hog here is enlightenment, not X.  Quake3 is also resource hungry.  But
enlightenment is specifically designed for boxes with lots of resources to
spare.  If you want something similar but with a smaller memory footprint,
you might look at icewm.

> X is the biggest memory pig out there. If you're setting up a task specific 
> machine to run without X (Masquarading, DNS, mail, whatever), 32 should be 
> just fine. My masqurading box only has 24M RAM and a 400M disk. runs like
> a champ. Although it takes it about an hour to compile a kernel. I'm
> thinking of throwing a 2nd disk in there so I can set up a dedicated Quake3
> server.

Again, you can run in 32MB fine under X if you're aware of where that
memory usage comes from.  Window managers chew up big chunks of memory.
The X server (specifically AcceleratedX, but XFree86 should be similar)
reserve blocks of memory to speed screen refreshes (which is one reason
they appear so big under "top") but free that memory up when necessary.

Games chew up lots of memory.  Don't blame X for everything.  Heck, I run
Civ Call To Power on my laptop with X and Applix running at the same time
(that's part of how I did my game reviews for Linux Journal and Linux
Magazine).  Worked fine.  Quake may be a bigger hog.  It's not just X,
though.

-- 
Michael J. Hammel                               The Graphics Muse 
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                      http://www.graphics-muse.com
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