RAM ????

What's the deal with RAM ? I've D/L and burned 6 different distros. All of them said they required a minimum of 128M ram but they all install and run fast and smooth on my old pavilion 4550 with 96M.

Everything Linux 1798 This topic was started by ,


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173 Posts
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What's the deal with RAM ? I've D/L and burned
6 different distros. All of them said they required
a minimum of 128M ram but they all install and run
fast and smooth on my old pavilion 4550 with 96M.
I've come to the conclusion that the efficiency of
the more recent distros is underrated.
.
My wife had the gall to ask if I know what I'm doing.
Hey, trying figure out what I'm doing is 90% of the fun.
If I knew what I'm doing I'd probably be bored.
I told her to ask again in about 30 years and just maybe
I'll have an answer.

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39 Posts
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I do like a healthy argument in marriage - and planning one to last 30 years sounds like a great way to keep the homefires burning
 
I guess with RAM it's down a bit to what your using you PC for. I used to have a laptop with 96Mb (I think it was a PII but that could be me romanticising about the last decent laptop I ever had use of.) Anyway, I ran that really well on Suse 8 about a year ago, loved it, had no worries, used it for fairly basic things, feeling my way around using network tools to help configure work's network. Fooling around with it in my spare time and generally enjoying the freedom that a Linux/Laptop combo brings.
 
Leaving aside those wispy clouds of faroff memories...
 
My Current setup is Fedora on a Duron 1300 with 512Mb DDR RAM and a 60Gb drive along with a poorly supported graphics card SIS315something and that originally had 128Mb RAM and because I don't run the newer RAM any faster than i did the old stick, I have noticed very little difference at all.
 
I think you are correct in thinking that Linux is underselling itself - I imagine that the new distros are doing what windows has done for a long time and pick the highest viable common denominator (remember the packaging that told you minimum and recomended specifications.)
 
Maybe there isn't any mileage in saying that Redhat will run on a pentium or a Celeron when people are mainly looking for P4's Xeons and Athlons.
 
Is that a bit too cynical - it hard to tell through sleep-deprived eyes and my wife will slap me if I'm late to bed AGAIN.

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Sometimes I think that they suggest that much RAM for gui systems... 8)

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I use a Dell 4550 with a 120 gig hd, 2. something gig pentium 4 and 512 mb ram. Although I installed a swap, I don't use it. I read somewhere that having that much ram kind of negates the purpose of having a swap. My machine runs faster with the swap turned off than on because everything is forced through the memory. I haven't tried this on a box with smaller than 512 ram. It would be an interesting experiment if anyone wanted to try it..

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i am running a third class system (at least i think its third class)
 
its 128mb ram
 
intel-celeron 1.1ghz processor with a third party Azza motherboard which sucks, frankly. but i m running red hat 9 with X-window system and all works fine for me.