[muppetman]

I wonder why it needs 20MB minimum. Back in the day linux 2.0.33 would boot happily into a GUI and everything on an 8MB machine.

Or maybe I misremember... I know my machine at the time got upgraded to 24MB so maybe it was that machine I was running.

Anyway it's neat this can still be done.

[phire]

This floppy decompresses the entire initrd image into memory at boot, which "wastes" memory compared a proper install on a HDD. You can also lower memory requirements further by enabling swap.

A floppy distro (especially one relying on a compressed initrd) will inherently require more memory. And I suspect the maker of this distro is using a different definition of "minimum" than we would have used back in the 90s (closer to "recommended").

However, it looks like modern linux kernels just require more memory; The kernel binary is certainly larger, floppinux is spending an entire 888KB on it's very stripped down modern linux (doesn't even have networking enabled), while older floppy distros using 2.2/2.4 kernels keep it under 512KB (with networking, and a bunch of other features.

[w84death]

Confirming.

Also the goal was to run LATEST kernel with no changes - just config. With other compression algorithms it was impossible to fit everything into a floppy. And I really wanted to have nano and some space to save few files. Without this it would be totally not usable OS.

[queenkjuul]

I had 2.2.x running on my 386 last year in 4MB. Not enough for a full GUI though but enough to set up TCP/IP and Samba to image a drive over the network.

8MB, at least in an emulator, can run a basic Xterm but not a lot else (though it'll happily run as a remote X frontend for a more powerful machine over Ethernet, it was fun to see it try to render Gimp 3 running on my desktop lol)

My 16MB 486 had no issues with a full IceWM session (this was kind of my hacked version of BasicLinux which itself was built on a ~2000 version of Slackware)

[znpy]

if you have an X server running then maybe you can exploit Xorg/X11's network transparency and run heavier apps on a beefier machine.

[queenkjuul]

Yeah, it does that happily in 4MB

[dcminter]

You could run X11 in 4Mb at one point, although I rather wished I didn't.

[EvanAnderson]

Yikes-- bringing back memories of frustration. X11 on my 486SX w/ 4MB was excruciating. It would swap like crazy. Adding 8MB more RAM made such a difference. Kernel compiles were much less swappy, too. (I can still the buy I bought the four 2MB 30-pin SIMMs secondhand from but I can't remember how much I gave for them in 1993 or 1994. I feel like it was more than $100, though...)

[charcircuit]

That's not even big enough to hold a single 1080p framebuffer.

[avian]

The Compaq laptop I was using had a 486SX and 4 MB of RAM. It had a 640x480 (if I remember correctly) screen and I'm pretty sure the framebuffer was in a separate video RAM that was not counted in that 4 MB. Used to type a lot of LaTeX on that laptop and used X11 for previews - xfree86 even had a special driver for the specific video hardware that laptop had. Not sure if I used a window manager. I think I just pointed ghostscript at the X11 screen from a text-mode console.

[queenkjuul]

Not at 24bpp, but maybe at 8bpp?

[dcminter]

Indeed. So far as I recall I had a greyscale monitor that couldn't do more than 800x600. I think it was a 486sx and I probably still had a 32GB MFM hard disk at that point so it was a very underwhelming machine.

I think 1MB of RAM in a simm was about £100 at that point, but it's been a while!

[a96]

Yes. Also X in 1bpp was not even rare (e.g. Sun bwtwo).

[walrus01]

I'm going to guess from the size of the kernel, since for distribution it has to be a fairly 'generic' kernel with just about every driver built into it. If one were to compile a custom 6.14 kernel for a specific hardware target with only 1 model of NIC (3c509b for example), etc, it could be a lot smaller.

[Wowfunhappy]

Why does the number of drivers compiled in affect memory use? Shouldn't the kernel just load what it needs and ignore the rest?

[nycerrrrrrrrrr]

If it's compiled into the kernel it'll occupy memory regardless if it's being used. If it's built as a kernel module then it doesn't occupy memory until loaded.

[newsoftheday]

I ran it on a 5 meg Tandy, 1 meg permanent on the motherboard and 4 I added.

[kjs3]

I think you could run 2.0 + X11 in 4MB in a pinch. I know I ran 2.2 + X11 in 5MB on a cast-off i386SX; tight but useable. If I recall right, 2.0 & 2.2 would run in 2MB without X11 (but a GUI like MGR might fit). 8MB was pretty good and 16MB was positively spacious.

Edit: Add: 2MB/4MB boot with a stripped down kernel, not generic.

[queenkjuul]

I got 2.2 with BusyBox to consume ~2200K at boot after a lot of fiddling. Left me plenty of user space for doing command line work on my 4MB 386; i mentioned in another comment though, X was only really useful as a remote terminal in 4MB, to run a local program via X pretty much required 8MB. But pretty sure i got Doom running in X on 8MB...

I did all these experiments a year or two ago. I lost most of my work due to a hard drive failure (the one in my workstation, not the 386 lol) but all the surviving work is on my github:

https://github.com/queenkjuul/basiclinux-lcars