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