Reply to post: Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities

Excuse me, sir. You can't store your things there. Those 7 gigabytes are reserved for Windows 10

DuncanLarge Silver badge

Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities

"You can't get any modern OS to run on 128MB of memory and 2GB of hard drive space. Not even a modern CLI-only Linux will exist happily in that*"

Well I decided to try it.

I downloaded Debian 9.0.6 x64 XFCE DVD#1 and ran the installer on a VM with 128MB of ram and a 2GB drive.

The installer said that it needed at least 167MB of free memory, although I was given the option to continue and a warning that it may cause issues. So I decided to bump up the ram to 256MB only for the smooth installation. I only installed the base system and standard system utilities plus SSH server. No Xorg or XFCE (that was an option). I allowed the installer to decide its own partitions (one partition was the default choice).

The HDD space was 46% used with approx 850MB remaining (some of the 2.0 GB was taken for a swap partition by the installer).

Upon boot the system is using 47MB out of the 256MB ram.

As I needed a more usable system than a base system I installed these:

Midnight Commander

Emacs24-nox

GCC (plus other needed packages)

lynx

So although 128MB ram was too little for the installer to guarantee correct operation I was able to get a system running with 256MB and 2 GB of space that can do some useful stuff. It can browse the web, transfer files, connect to a ssh server (and act as one) and develop python,perl and C.

I did try to install the bsd-games package however that was not on DVD #1 and I had not bothered adding a network mirror (I could have done so).

After all that I was left with 565MB of free HDD space. Totally enough to write some text based application code :)

I just wish I had Adventure on DVD 1. Guess I could add a network mirror or have fun writing my own!

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