Memory economical Linux installation?

[Gilboa Davara]

On Sat, 2009-11-28 at 11:13 +0200, Omer Zak wrote:
> I was contacted by someone, who has an old laptop with 192MB memory, and
> wants to install Linux (Ubuntu 9.04) on it.
> 
> I advised him to first upgrade the memory to at least 512MB.
> 
> However, as an alternative to upgrading the laptop, I'd like to know if
> and which distributions and desktops being actively maintained are
> economical in memory usage yet provide X-Window in some form.
> 
> Thanks,
> --- Omer
> 

I'm running CentOS 5.4 on a ~10 y/o laptop with PII366Mhz/256MB RAM and
it works OK. (Javascript sites under FF 3.0 are rather slow, but
everything else, including OpenOffice is OK)

In general, I removed most of the services keeping only the essentials
(iptables, selinux), replaced GDM with SLIM login manager, and replaced
the DE with a combination of IceWM + iDesk. In general I usually finish
boot with >80MB of memory used.

The only issue is DRI on the mach64 which requires a lot of manual
patching.

- Gilboa