Memory Requirements for Fedora Core [Was: FC3 ******. It takes up too much memory!]

[James McKenzie]

Scot L. Harris wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-01-27 at 17:35, akonstam at trinity.edu wrote:
> 
> 
> Any system today with just 128M of memory is going to run slow
> regardless of if it is Linux or Windows.  On top of that the OP is
> running Linux in a virtual machine which has its own over head added to
> the mix.  In such an environment the OP should consider running without
> a window manager and many of the other optional packages that Fedora
> comes with.  However I doubt that is what he is looking for. 
>
Why have such high requirements?  This is called "Bloat" and could be 
intolerable.  What if I want to install Linux on a 'minimal' system? 
Some folks out there cannot afford a new system every couple of years 
and some folks feel it is a waste to place into the trash system their 
old systems.  Sure, you can recycle, but why buy a new system just to 
keep up with your Operating System?

> The OP might find dual booting works better since that would eliminate
> the overhead of running in a virtual system.  Additional memory is also
> recommended as that will most likely improve the response times
> greatly.  After that the user would need to run some reproducible
> benchmarks against different parts of the system to track down where the
> performance bottle neck is located.   
> 
I agree and I do this.  However, what if the OP does not want to 
reconfigure his system or does not know how?

>>From the release notes:
> 
> I have found that 256MB is marginal and prefer systems with at least
> 512MB of memory if you plan on running any serious applications.  128MB
> system trying to run a graphical interface is not recommended even in
> the release notes.
>
I run FC3 on a system that has 384MB of Ram, but if I desire, I can 
reconfigure it to 128MB.  And I should be able to run LINUX on that system.

> I suspect Windows has similar memory requirements as well.
> 
Depends on which version you want to run.  Windows98SE "only" requires 
32MB of memory.  However, WindowsXP has almost the same requirements as FC3.

I feel, like some other folks, that FC3 is loosing its memory advantage 
to Windows.  However, LINUX is very configurable and can and does run on 
memory constrained systems.  We need to keep LINUXs memory profile low 
so that it can be run on memory constrained systems.

-- 
James McKenzie