Tested SuSE 7.3 RAM requirements, here's results.
Anthony Boyd
seems like the height of bloat. Since no one could give solid
answers, I bought a copy and did some research. Here are the results.
On a Pentium 166 mhz, 32 MB RAM:
SuSE 7.3 tried to start up YaST 2 in graphical mode. Graphical mode
*requires* 64 MB RAM. I didn't have that much. So YaST 2 changed to
text mode -- which looks a lot like the graphical mode. Text mode
*requires* 48 MB RAM. Yep, text mode. Needs 48 megs. So text mode
crapped out after a screen or two. However, at that point the install
did not die: YaST 1 took over the installation. YaST 1 operated under
32 megs of RAM just fine. However, YaST 1 had some ugly text-based
screens which seemed to be missing some features. It didn't
auto-config a lot of my hardware.
Once installed, I rebooted and logged in. According to "top" my 32
megs of RAM was all used up and running about 4 megs into swap. Some
unneeded daemons were running, so I killed them off, and was left with
a working SuSE 7.3 install that ran in FIFTEEN megs. I suspect I
could get it down to about 10 or 11 megs if I tried really hard. Text
shells only, no X-Windows. If I took the time to install IceWM-lite,
I might even be able to do limited GUI work on a 32 meg computer.
The worst part of the install was the packages. The miserable little
system spent over an hour just on one operation: "Checking package
dependencies..." It was clearly not able to process the dependencies
of some 4000+ packages in 32 megs of RAM. My hard disk was working
overtime.
Still, I think SuSE is more RAM-friendly than advertised. It appears
as though I could put a drive on a fast computer, run the install to
create a minimal non-GUI system, and then place the drive into an old
16 meg computer. And in theory, it should work. Services would have
to be minimal, maybe just some firewall services or Apache with most
of the modules not loaded. So for those looking to put a new kernel
and software onto old hardware, I guess it's possible with SuSE,
although it's difficult.
Joseph Haig
> A few days ago I asked about SuSE's recommended 128 megs of RAM, which
> seems like the height of bloat.
I would suspect that 128M is a comfortable amount of memory to run the
'Default + Office' option - this includes KDE and Staroffice. I
certainly would use these two packages without close to this amount of
memory. On the other hand, my machine has 48M and it works quite
happily with FVWM2 and LaTeX.
>
> Once installed, I rebooted and logged in. According to "top" my 32
> megs of RAM was all used up and running about 4 megs into swap. Some
> unneeded daemons were running, so I killed them off, and was left with
> a working SuSE 7.3 install that ran in FIFTEEN megs.
Which daemons did you kill off? I would be *very* interested to know.
Bye,
Joe
Anthony Boyd
> webwa...@my-deja.com (Anthony Boyd) wrote:
>
>> Once installed, I rebooted and logged in. According to "top" my 32
>> megs of RAM was all used up and running about 4 megs into swap. Some
>> unneeded daemons were running, so I killed them off, and was left with
>> a working SuSE 7.3 install that ran in FIFTEEN megs.
>
> Which daemons did you kill off? I would be *very* interested to know.
Printing and sendmail (is this smtp_daemon?), mostly. Aw hell, let me walk
over to the box and see what I did...
...wow, I did a lot more than Sendmail. I edited the rc.config file, and
set APMD (power management?), GPM (something to do with the mouse?), ATD
(the at daemon), HOTPLUG and ISAPNP (detection daemons, not really needed
now), and even INETD to "no". INETD probably needs to be re-done, so that
the man page formatter, which apparently is started by INETD, keeps
working, but the rest does not.
How could I get it down to 10 or 11 megs? Well, recompile the kernel for
starters. Then, I'm told but I haven't looked into how to do it yet, I
could disable some of the terminals. I think you get something like 4-8
terminals, right? You press ALT-F1, ALT-F2, and so on. Each one give you
a new shell to sign in. Then just more fine-tuning of the apps listening
to the ports, removing most or all of them.
Anyhow, what I turned off was pretty sloppy. I am sure that more
intelligent people could do a much better job.
Robert Davies
> A few days ago I asked about SuSE's recommended 128 megs of RAM, which
> seems like the height of bloat. Since no one could give solid
> answers, I bought a copy and did some research. Here are the results.
>
> On a Pentium 166 mhz, 32 MB RAM:
Ha, hahahaahahahahahha, this is the most brilliant post!
Wow, some real info!! I like the way YaST keeps plugging away, it shows
that the marketing droids have not entirely taken over from techies at SuSE.
I'm not sure who's more masochistic, YaST or Anthony for trying this out!
Rob