[devilsadvocate]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I guess it depends on what you're willing to settle for.

XP technically "runs" in 256MB of RAM, for suitable values of "run". If you're willing to wait for several minutes for operations to complete, it might be OK.

In the installs you mention, how long did it take XP to boot from a cold start? How long did it take in invoke, say Word (or Open Office Writer). How long did it take to load Firefox, and what was it like once up?

If your answers to any of the above are less than one minute, please tell me what magic spell you used. Did you burn the manual on the altar with the sheep guts?

I sacrificed a command-line virgin.

As you can probably guess I didn't stopwatch the event and was only paying attention to cold-boot because I didn't want anything happening which would make the machines unsaleable (they weren't mine in the first place; I was asked to "just throw Windows on them so I can get rid of them"). Neither one took more than a minute from BIOS to desktop. The first run of Firefox couldn't have been more than 15 seconds and the first run of IE (in order to get Firefox) was about the same; I consider that a long time on any other machine. I didn't install Office or anything else; obviously if I got ambitious I could make either one of them choke but I've locked up a Win7 box with 2GB also. On the other end, I've gotten XP to boot and run in as little as 64MB RAM, on a 2GB hard drive no less, but it was similar to the results you describe. I saved that hard drive for posterity and still have it here someplace. In the middle, my aforementioned Gateway Celeron box from several years ago required a fair amount of multitasking before redraw from the onboard video became noticeable. Anything's possible if you try hard enough.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

For a 128MB RAM box, I'd install Linux, make sure I gave it a swap partition twice the size of RAM, and have low expectations of what it would do. (On my notebook, for example, I don't even try to access YouTube - I see a slideshow of still pictures, not video.)

My first Linux install was on a P4 with 128 and swap set up as you describe because I didn't know any better and that's what Anaconda told me to do. I didn't have to lower my expectations because I didn't have any in the first place. It was even running Gnome. Performed well.

Now, before you get the impression that we have different levels of acceptable performance, my main rig is a 4-core Xeon OCed to 4.09GHz watercooled (that's 24/7, not a one-off suicide run...I've actually benched it at 4.5), with 8 GB DDR2-800 OCed to 1140-something MHz, and an Nvidia 9600GT OCed to 700/1100 (which I consider woefully behind the times) pushing twin 20" Acer widescreens. I'm looking into a method for running Quadro drivers for the vid card but all things considered I rank this setup as out-of-date.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

There was a poster on the Puppy forums who detailed how he got Puppy up an a machine with 16MB RAM. It involved stripping out everything he could remove that would still permit a GUI using JWM, and he had to build the actual image on a more powerful machine and trasfer it to the target box when it was ready.

I was told, without any detail, that Puppy would run on 16MB. It requires 128 for the ramdisk even though it doesn't necessarily need that much to run, however, leading to the build-and-transfer thing you describe. I won't say that's too much like work because something deliberately made that small would most likely be used on an embedded device anyway. At my site I reviewed Puppy alongside Damn Small Linux, which actually will run on the build target with 16MB if given the appropriate boot parameters.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Which is why more RAM to provide a larger and more effective cache is the first performance enhancement I recommend. PCs are I/O bound, not compute bound, and spend most of their time waiting for something, like a read or write to complete. As the pundit once said "All machines wait at the same speed".

Still can't find who said that. Doesn't make it any less true, just saying.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Gnome may use GTK, but the converse is not true. Wiping the Xubuntu install and installing from MinimalCD gave me a system that was usable, with a choice of XFCE or LXDE as the GUI when I boot into it. (I prefer XFCE, and use it under Puppy as well, in place fo the default JWM.)

I like XFCE as well; it's one of several DE/WMs I have installed. As of version 4.6, however, it's still GTK-based. Therefore in some distributions installing XFCE will pull in some Gnome deps, especially if said distros are Gnome-based in the first place.