[CentOS] Low-memory Centos5?

Thu May 29 14:38:41 UTC 2008
Bob Taylor <bob8221 at gmail.com>

On Thu, 2008-05-29 at 14:12 +0100, Ned Slider wrote:
> 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?

> 
> As others have said, you should be fine with 384MB RAM. One thing to 
> note - I think the graphical installer requires 512MB to run (check the 
> release notes) so you would need to perform a text mode install. Do a 
> fairly minimal install and add whatever you want afterwards with YUM.

I have been running FC 3 and now CentOS 5.1 on an old Gateway 2000 with
only 256MB RAM. Both installed with GUI. Only some editing of services.
I have 1 Gig of swap. I currently have 1 instance of emacs, Evolution,
CDDBSlave2, Firefox 2.0.0.12 and 2 Gnome terminals plus a whole lot of
services running most of which I *hope* I don't need. Screen refresh is
slow but not too much. The machine starts to *really* slow down after
about 15% swap. All I do is logout. Oh, this is my only computer. If
anyone wants to tell me to buy a new one, please send me the money.
Otherwise keep your silence. :-)

Bob
-- 
Bob Taylor