hex11
Senior Member
Posts: 1485
Registered: 09-09 |
Decent (for me anyway) is like a P120 with 32 MB. Back in the day (1996), that was sufficient to run even OS/2 comfortably. Linux only needed 8 MB (16 MB if using X) to run great. And with those specs, regular DOS gaming was awesome, except the config.sys and related stuff (QEMM, Deskview, meh...)
These days you want more RAM, because Linux has gotten more bloated. But you don't need tons. Slackware will install on 64 MB, and so will OpenBSD. My OBSD laptop has 1/2 GB, but hardly any of it is being used at the moment, in fact only about 64 MB if you subtract the 128 MB RAM disk I have mounted on /tmp (a luxury). The rest of my memory is sitting idle, and no swap is used. And that's while running Xorg, twm, some xterms, tmux, a bunch of shells, graphical web browser (Links 2.2), and mplayer (playing OGG file). Oh Yadex shell is still running too, but not the GUI. :) Of course the typical system daemons are running also (syslogd, pflogd, lpd, inetd, dhclient, sendmail, and some other things).
If you went with Linux, you could even do away with Xorg completely and use the framebuffer console. Sadly OpenBSD doesn't have that option on i386 architecture (on Sparc and some others it does). So I think you'd probably manage fine with just 64 MB, even today. Just don't run daemons/programs you don't need, don't load unnecessary drivers, and stay away from Gnome/KDE/etc. "desktop environments" and other memory hogging junk. ;)
Edit: Oh, and of course the obvious solution for the really old, "only 8MB RAM" 486: just download an ancient Linux distro. I did have such a machine in 1995, and it had no problems running contemporary Slackware, svgalib doom port (id's binary compiled by Dave Taylor), with OPL3 music provided by musserver. :)
Last edited by hex11 on 06-04-11 at 00:41
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