Looking for a small Linux that will run with a GUI in 4MB of
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| Author | Content |
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| pogson Jun 03, 2007 1:12 PM EDT |
You must have time on your hands... Oh well, in the spirit of being able to do anything with Linux... Check out this link: http://tinyurl.com/32yo4x "1.7. How Much Memory Does Linux Need? At least 4MB, and then you will need to use special installation procedures until the disk swap space is installed. Linux will run comfortably in 4MB of RAM, although X Apps will run slowly because they need to swap out to disk. Some recent applications, like the later versions of Netscape, require as much as 64MB of physical memory. There is a distribution, "Small Linux," that will run on machines with 2MB of RAM. Refer to Where can I get Linux material by FTP?" You can get RedHat 7.0 from here: ftp://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/7.0/en/ Your machine may have various proprietary hardware making it very difficult. Good luck. Without a CD or USB, you will need to install over the network from a server. Several methods of installation are offered. You could move the files onto the hard drive by putting the drive onto another computer temporarily and installing there or partitioning and installing on the old machine into one partition from another. ftp://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/7.0/en/doc/RH-DOCS/rhl-ig-en-7.0/s1-install-sel-method.html You can find floppy disc images for the installer and drivers here: ftp://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/7.0/en/os/i386/images/ Make all five floppy discs while you are at it in case you need them. It would not hurt to make two copies because floppies are unreliable in these days. If I had such a box, I would seriously attempt to increase the memory if possible. Even then, it will never be a stellar performer. Retirement or use without the GUI would be better choices, I am sure. Without a GUI, there are many floppy-based distros that would do. You can even set up a basic server with tomsrtbt and LOAF, etc. |
| Sander_Marechal Jun 03, 2007 1:15 PM EDT |
Just wondering... with 4 Mb of RAM, could it be used as a thin client to e.g. an LTSP server or the original poster's desktop PC? If it can, I think that would be the best option. |
| pogson Jun 03, 2007 1:24 PM EDT |
sander wrote:"could it be used as a thin client to e.g. an LTSP server" LTSP usually wants to avoid swapping X stuff and 4MB might require that. Swapping really sucks at 10 mbits/s. At 100 mbit/s, it might work. Perhaps the client could swap to the local hard drive. The display on that thing is probably 640x480 or 800x600 which takes far less memory than we use today. LTSP is very general and you may want a smaller kernel for this thing. Most installations of LTSP recommend 32-64MB minimum on the client. You still need to start X on that client and kernel + X is pretty large. If memory could be increased, LTSP would be the best, I am sure. Can you find a 64MB module for it? It might cost more than the machine... |
| jdixon Jun 03, 2007 1:27 PM EDT |
> ...could it be used as a thin client... I don't think Tracy mentions anywhere whether or not the machine has a network interface. At that age, it's entirely possible that it doesn't. |
| pogson Jun 03, 2007 1:30 PM EDT |
One extreme course of action would be to obtain the source of the kernel from RH7 and re-build with only the drivers and features needed for the particular machine. That would minimize the space occupied in RAM by the kernel and drivers and might speed up booting and operation in general. You must love the machine to do this much work... |
| pogson Jun 03, 2007 1:41 PM EDT |
jdixon wrote:"I don't think Tracy mentions anywhere whether or not the machine has a network interface." True. Machines of that era may not even have had a PCMCIA interface. Dial-up would be an additional complication... |
| tracyanne Jun 03, 2007 1:43 PM EDT |
Quoting:don't think Tracy mentions anywhere whether or not the machine has a network interface. At that age, it's entirely possible that it doesn't. It doesn't. Quoting:You must love the machine to do this much work... No, I just thought it would be fun. The bloke that found it in the tip couldn't get it to boot, so I took it home and had a play with it, and got it to boot, it booted into Win95, just the OS no applications. So I thought it might be fun to give him back a working Linux box, if I can. |
| pogson Jun 03, 2007 2:20 PM EDT |
If there is no network interface (or PCMCIA card?) the best procedure is to remove the hard drive, and put it into another machine to partition and copy the RH7 or other distro in. Then boot from floppy and install from one partition to another on the old machine. http://tinyurl.com/2dsjkg You may be able to actually get the installation started from DOS. You put a file called autoboot.bat and loadlin.exe on the drive and invoke it from autoexec.bat at boot time... That file is at http://tinyurl.com/25qbbb If you could defrag / repartition that other OS without killing it long enough to start the installation you could save pain. This may not be legal if the licence is invalid... I do not think anyone here will tell. To install from disc, you need the files from the /os directory on a partition and the installer reads the rpms and installs to another partition. You may not have space for two copies and without CD or network, copying by floppies will be time consuming and error-prone. |
| Aladdin_Sane Jun 03, 2007 2:54 PM EDT |
Need LXer help for this thread. I can't see most of this thread because it is wider than my screen. Anyone know a workaround? The right hand side of the text is overlapped by the right hand panel. I get no L-to-R scroll bar here. I'm at 1400x1050 resolution and using Seamonkey/Iceape ver 1.1.1. I can usually widen the browser window, or "it wasn't that important." But in this case, the significant technical detail makes it "mission-critical" to my understanding of the conversation and at full width a significant part is still cut off. Apparently, the root cause is the posting of a long URL in non-clicky format. |
| jdixon Jun 03, 2007 3:01 PM EDT |
Well, if you're using firefox, then ctrl - will shrink your text size to make the text readable. Of course if you're getting up there in years (like me) that causes other problems. :( Since you're using seamonkey, that will probably work for you too. On this particular thread, I had to use ctrl - twice to get it to fit on a 1024x768 display. |
| Aladdin_Sane Jun 03, 2007 3:18 PM EDT |
Works for me...Thanks! |
| pogson Jun 03, 2007 3:19 PM EDT |
Sorry about that. It works fine in Opera... Is there a way to insert a clickable link in this forum? |
| Sander_Marechal Jun 03, 2007 4:13 PM EDT |
@pogson: LXer automagically clickifies URL's, but apparently not URLs starting with ftp:// I suggest you suggest a bugfix to the editors and use tinyurl in the mean time for the long link. Back on topic: Perhaps a severely trimmed Linux From Scratch or Gentoo would fit in 4 MB? It would be best to swap the hard drive and build it on another machine though. Avoid long compilation times. |
| SinkOrSwim Jun 03, 2007 4:19 PM EDT |
I keep lots of interesting but miscellanious info around. Here is one that may help find a tiny dstro. http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Mini_Distributions/ |
| gus3 Jun 03, 2007 7:01 PM EDT |
The laptop has a parallel port, so NFS over PLIP might work. Although, getting it set up in the installation stage will be a challenge. Slackware used to have "ZipSlack", a pre-packaged ZIP file (or several split-up ZIP files to fit on floppies) containing a working Linux, designed specifically to load and run from a DOS/Windows partition. It also had a file to attempt to pre-install 8M of swap, to assist with low-memory situations. http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware-8.1/zipslack/ N.B.: Some of the URL's in the docs are from times when Slackware 8.1 was the latest release, and specify simply "/slackware/" instead of "/slackware-8.1/". You will need to adjust the URL's accordingly if you need to go on a file hunt. |
| moopst Jun 03, 2007 7:23 PM EDT |
I'm getting the same problem with text wrapping. It seems to be wrapping after about 4 words are cut off on the right side of each box. If I maximize the window it just wraps at a different part of the text with other words missing. No such problem on the next thread. I can see all the text by viewing the source or if I shrink the font down to the smallest size. I'm using Konqueror 3.5.4 on Slackware 11 |
| dcparris Jun 03, 2007 8:00 PM EDT |
Pogson: You can edit your post yourself, and try using the TinyURL thingy Sander mentioned. I've posted a note to Bob about this formatting issue. We may be intentionally rejecting ftp, but I don't know. |
| vainrveenr Jun 03, 2007 8:45 PM EDT |
To help answer answer tracyannne's query, I myself have successfully installed BasicLinux (http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/baslinux/) on a 486 with 4mb RAM.
Floppy drive good, parallel port good, no CD-ROM drive, trashed PCMCIA slot, use of a tomsrtbt floppy
From http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/baslinux/
Quoting:DOS VERSION 3.50 This version comes as a 2.8 mb zip file. It unzips to a directory on drive C: BL3 boots from DOS and runs in a loop file.Add-ons for BL3 include Quoting: icewm.tgz Window manager (replacement for swm) sylpheed.tgz Graphical mail client ssh.tgz Secure shell (replacement for telnet) mc.tgz Midnight Commander (file manager) yabasic.tgz Programming language (BASIC interpreter) sc.tgz Spreadsheet sqlite.tgz Database manager (single-user SQL) mpg123.tgz Plays mp3 audio files. smbclien.tgz Client for accessing Windows network shares passwd.tgz Adds user logins and passwords to BL3. x-libs.tgz Additional X libraries. no-xvesa.tgz Things needed to run an Xserver (instead of Xvesa). abiword.tgz Graphical word processor (requires SVGA) links2.tgz Graphical browser (requires SVGA) beep.tgz Plays notes via the PC speaker lincity.tgz Simulated city (management game) matanza.tgz Multi-player space battle (via network) xdigger.tgz Classic puzzle-game xfreecell.tgz Solitaire card game xrunner.tgz Platform game (similar to Lode Runner)from http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/baslinux/a... On this super-slow 486 laptop with 4mb RAM, I recall making a 10mb swap 2.5 times RAM partition to squeeze best performance out of this, and then eventually being able to install BasicLinux onto the DOS partition to run native Linux from the hard drive w/o floppies. Parallel-port Iomega zipdrive was for updating the install with several of the above BL3 add-ons. |
| tracyanne Jun 04, 2007 1:41 AM EDT |
BasicLinux looks interesting, This should save me the trouble of trying to find extra RAM. |
| pogson Jun 04, 2007 10:19 AM EDT |
Shucks! http://Tinyurl.com seems to be off the air... My firewall seems to be blocking it... |
| dcparris Jun 04, 2007 10:27 AM EDT |
I got it for you. It seems to have worked. |
| pogson Jun 04, 2007 10:52 AM EDT |
I had an "anti-spyware black-hole" in my firewall. |
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