[nzlug] machine pre loaded with linux

[cr]

On Wednesday 07 February 2007 22:14, Daniel Lawson wrote:
> > In other words: yes, a 128MB machine could *comfortably* run an X server
> > with plenty of space left over for local applications, let alone only
> > running them remotely.
> >
> > 64MB would require a little swapping -- all my code is mapped in,
> > without swap in use -- but should be quite comfortable.
>
> In theory, this looks great. In practice it's not so peachy because of
> the behaviour of certain components.
>
> I used to work[1] in the WAND group at Waikato Uni, and we deployed
> linux based thin clients with 128 MB of ram, and a debian woody (2.4
> kernel, xfree86 3.something) with an NFSroot system.  No swap. They ran
> perfectly fine, unless you used mozilla or firefox quite a lot. The
> pixmap allocation would increase, and eventually the kernel would
> overcommit memory, and X (being the requesting application), would die.
>
> The initial solution was "close firefox, mozilla and thunderbird every
> night" or "log out every night", but that got tedious, and these were
> dedicated per-user machines, not general purpose ones. After messing
> round with network backed swap (via NFS + patches or via NBD), we put
> another 64 or 128 MB of ram in them.
>
> Later on, they were upgraded to Debian Sarge with a 2.6 kernel and
> whichever version of Xorg sarge comes with. This had much nicer
> behaviour when a memory allocation error occured - the X server catches
> the error and passes it on to the requesting application, thus killing
> it instead. Much nicer.
>
> However, this still means that, even on systems with 256MB of ram, your
> app would still die when it overcommits. This isn't just the mozilla
> suite of programs either. Try to load a large PDF with embedded images?
> Or how about a satellite photo? Or do any gimp work with large images?
> Forget it.
>
> My point is: 128 MB *should* be enough. After all, these are thin client
> units and are designed to do this. The HP ones ship X natively and often
> have local copies of firefox on them if you don't want to require
> terminal services of some sort.   If you log out regularly or don't want
> to do any heavy lifting in terms of graphics viewing, you'll be fine.
> But I wouldn't guarantee you'll never have an application fail due to
> lack of memory.
>
>
>
> [1] I no longer work at WAND, but I'm pretty sure they still run the
> same system. Newer hardware than before, and maybe a newer base distro.

My 10c worth - my first laptop was a  very second-hand Thinkpad i1200 with 
64MB of RAM.   I put Debian Woody on it, it struggled with Gnome but ran 
Windowmaker nicely.   GIMP worked fine (though the images I was working on 
were intended for webpage use so typically < 500K   JPEGs); Opera was fine as 
a browser; Kmail for email; gFTP for uploads;  Bluefish and GQView worked 
fine.   Open Office was too heavy.    I could typically have Bluefish, Opera, 
GQView and GIMP loaded all at once with no strife.

So as a general-purpose internet-connected home machine, it worked fine so 
long as I didn't deliberately overload it.    Which I didn't, and I never had 
a problem.   When I upgraded it to Sarge I seem to recall it was starting to 
struggle in 64MB but I didn't seriously try to lighten it as I'd just scored 
an extra 128MB of RAM.    I still have it as a standby, main reason I 
superseded it was that its battery is 100% dead so it can only run on the 
mains adapter - trip over the lead and everything dies.

cr