alt Hacker NewsI wonder why it needs 20MB minimum. Back in the day linux 2.0.33 would boot happily into a GUI and everything on an 8MB machine.
Or maybe I misremember... I know my machine at the time got upgraded to 24MB so maybe it was that machine I was running.
Anyway it's neat this can still be done.
Replies
dcminter • yesterday at 8:56 PM
You could run X11 in 4Mb at one point, although I rather wished I didn't.
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kjs3 • yesterday at 8:42 PM
I think you could run 2.0 + X11 in 4MB in a pinch. I know I ran 2.2 + X11 in 5MB on a cast-off i386SX; tight but useable. If I recall right, 2.0 & 2.2 would run in 2MB without X11 (but a GUI like MGR might fit). 8MB was pretty good and 16MB was positively spacious.
Edit: Add: 2MB/4MB boot with a stripped down kernel, not generic.
I'm going to guess from the size of the kernel, since for distribution it has to be a fairly 'generic' kernel with just about every driver built into it. If one were to compile a custom 6.14 kernel for a specific hardware target with only 1 model of NIC (3c509b for example), etc, it could be a lot smaller.