Memory economical Linux installation?

[Gilboa Davara]

On Sat, 2009-11-28 at 16:20 +0000, Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 04:34:23PM +0200, Gilboa Davara wrote:
> 
> > 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, 
> 
> Is GDM an issue? Its daemon is not memory-hungry. On my laptop it takes
> much less memory than, say, icewm. The login screen doesn't run when
> most of the system runs, so I don't really care about it.

Both Fedora and CentOS keep it active in init 5 - where it eats ~10MB of
RAM.
SLIM needs 1/4 of that.

I try to save what ever I can.

> 
> > and replaced
> > the DE with a combination of IceWM + iDesk. In general I usually finish
> > boot with >80MB of memory used.
> 
> LXDE may be a useful alternative for a desktop. Alternatively, if you
> want a simple window manager that at least shows Hebrew properly on
> window titles, use one of openbox(?), fvwm, jwm, E17(?) or anything
> based on gtk.
> 

Actually, being the maintainer of icewm under RHEL/CentOS and Fedora, I
fixed the title-bar issue a couple of months ago :)

- Gilboa