[CentOS] Low-memory Centos5?

[Robert Moskowitz]

Jeffrey B. Layton wrote:
> Good morning,
>
> I've inherited an old laptop from my wife that I'd like to
> use when I travel (it's fairly small with a 12" screen). The
> bad part is that it is maxed out on memory with 384MB.
> Has anyone played with using Centos5 on systems with
> little memory? Ideally, I don't need too much - Firefox,
> Openoffice, a little Perl/Python/C here and there. I was
> thinking about using either XFCE or Icewm as the window
> manager. I'd also like it to work with the existing wireless
> card (Dlink DWL-G650). Any thoughts or recommendations? 
I have a number of 256Mb Centos installs here with Gnome. I shut off as 
many services as possible, and it runs. I made the swap partition (Yes I 
manually create a separate swap partition instead of running it in LVM) 
at least 512Mb if not more.

Firefox 1.5 works fine. Watch yourself with OpenOffice, don't have too 
much running.

One trick I do with Centos servers running with only 256Mb, is run 
VNCserver and then from my notebook access with Gnome. This works great, 
only a one line change in the vnc files to have Gnome as your GUI on the 
server.