[e12e]

Oh wow, now I feel old. I remember compiling and running Java course work on a laptop with 8MB of RAM. The display was monochrome, and the compiler literally took ten minutes to spin up (as go get, and drink a cup of coffee before it's done - probably swapping like mad). But it worked well enough with x11 and fvwm.

I see i was on a supercharged "pro" workstation with that much ram, though:

http://www.fvwm.org/history/

> There were two or three reasons for starting FVWM and RXVT. First, I had a need 33 MHZ 486 laptop PC with only 4 MB of RAM, and I thought linux and X11 were way better than the windows versions of the day. X11 with TWM and xterm would run on my PC, but just barely.

[asveikau]

That's funny, because fvwm is much more usable than twm. I would have guessed it would be heavier on reasources because twm didn't do much.

I got on a nostalgia kick recently and switched back to fvwm on one of my machines. (Which incidentally runs FreeBSD.)

[wildduck]

Wow. Looks like a lot of old computer can be put to good use.

[anthk]

fvwm was always faster than TWM, even if at a first TWM runs faster. Also, TCL would be faster than Java :)

[earenndil]

Maybe back then, but nowadays I'm pretty sure java is a lot faster than tcl.

[e12e]

Actually the small Java gui app (tick tack toe, or something like it, I think) ran fine. And I think the startup problems with javac might have been solved too (use less ram) - but I never did get around to it. I think I tried IBMs "jikes" compiler, which I think was (at least partially) implemented in c++.

But mostly I was just shocked anyone could think running a wm could reasonablyrrequire a gig of ram...

[anthk]

>But mostly I was just shocked anyone could think running a wm could reasonablyrrequire a gig of ram...

Eh, most people run Fvwm/Blackbox/WMaker with 16MB/32MB of RAM. 8... well. To be confortable enough, maybe with NetBSD, FVWM, URxvt, a ultraslimmed kernel and jikes/any tiny Java compatible VM.