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#1 2008-08-07 21:34:53

nh
Member
From: England
Registered: 2008-07-09
Posts: 45

Has anyone installed Arch with 128 MB RAM?

I see in the Beginner's Guide and the Official Installation Guide that the minimum memory requirement for installing Arch is 160 MB.  Has anyone tried it with less?

I ask because I offered to install Linux on a friend's old laptop.  It has 128 MB RAM, 2.1 GB available disk space, and a 433 MHz processor.  At the moment I have a fairly minimal Ubuntu on there, and it runs surprisingly well.  It gives Windows 98 a run for its money! wink  But I'd like to see whether Arch runs with a smaller memory footprint and/or faster.

Last edited by nh (2008-08-07 21:40:15)

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#2 2008-08-07 22:20:52

nj
Member
Registered: 2007-04-06
Posts: 93

Re: Has anyone installed Arch with 128 MB RAM?

I did a few months ago. I had to install the base packages in two groups since the ram fs could not hold all of them. Other than that it worked fine.

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#3 2008-08-07 22:24:10

glad
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From: Norway
Registered: 2005-11-01
Posts: 103
Website

Re: Has anyone installed Arch with 128 MB RAM?

I installed on a laptop with 256MB that worked out good but can't say with 128MB

Good luck :-)

Btw, on my laptop KDE runs slowly and apps like Firefox or Opera arn't working well either. That laptop was a 1.5GHZ celeron machine.

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#4 2008-08-07 22:57:05

nh
Member
From: England
Registered: 2008-07-09
Posts: 45

Re: Has anyone installed Arch with 128 MB RAM?

nj, thanks, that's encouraging.  How do you install the base packages in two groups?

glad, have you tried Seamonkey?  I'm running that on Windows and Arch, and it seems to use consistently less memory than Firefox.  I've not yet had chance to compare it with Firefox on my friend's laptop.

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#5 2008-08-07 23:00:08

glad
Member
From: Norway
Registered: 2005-11-01
Posts: 103
Website

Re: Has anyone installed Arch with 128 MB RAM?

Nope, But I'l definetly give it a try

I tried both Firefox, Opera and Konqueror with the best performance on the latter.

Thanks for advice :-)

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#6 2008-08-08 14:44:33

quetzyg
Member
From: /home/quetzyg
Registered: 2006-08-03
Posts: 129

Re: Has anyone installed Arch with 128 MB RAM?

Hello!

I currently have Arch running on a Pentium II 333MHz with 128MB of RAM.

It's a headless server running SSH, Apache, MySQL, MLDonkey (eDonkey & Torrent networks).
I've got another headless server, also with 128 MB of RAM, only for playing mp3 with MPD + Icecast, but that one runs Slackware (Arch doesn't run on a AMD K6-2 sad).

And some time ago, I had Arch running only with 96 MB of RAM. tongue


ZzZz...

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#7 2008-08-08 14:49:47

Kane
Member
Registered: 2006-10-08
Posts: 220

Re: Has anyone installed Arch with 128 MB RAM?

ive got an old laptop with 128mb ram and 700Mhz celeron

runs xfce firefox etc fine, can be a little slow sometimes, but its useable

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#8 2008-08-08 15:02:10

nh
Member
From: England
Registered: 2008-07-09
Posts: 45

Re: Has anyone installed Arch with 128 MB RAM?

Kane, quetzyg, how did the installations go?  Did you install Arch before the minimum memory requirement went above 128 MB?

Last edited by nh (2008-08-08 15:05:04)

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#9 2008-08-08 15:05:38

Kane
Member
Registered: 2006-10-08
Posts: 220

Re: Has anyone installed Arch with 128 MB RAM?

i remember i had to use the lowmem(?) boot option i think. it was a while ago, and so im not sure wot the requirement was

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#10 2008-08-08 15:24:12

quetzyg
Member
From: /home/quetzyg
Registered: 2006-08-03
Posts: 129

Re: Has anyone installed Arch with 128 MB RAM?

Kane wrote:

i remember i had to use the lowmem(?) boot option i think. it was a while ago, and so im not sure wot the requirement was

Yup, the Arch boot CD has the lowmem parameter.

But there is also another (quicker!) way to install an Arch system, on low memory machines (supposing that the installer will complain about the low memory and won't let you continue the install process).

To save some time, I once used an HD with an Arch system already installed (from a Pentium III), installed the HD on a Pentium II, compiled a new kernel and wrote to the MBR (running from a LiveCD). If the kernel used isn't a custom one, I think that only writing to the MBR is enough.


ZzZz...

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#11 2008-08-08 15:27:50

quetzyg
Member
From: /home/quetzyg
Registered: 2006-08-03
Posts: 129

Re: Has anyone installed Arch with 128 MB RAM?

nh wrote:

Kane, quetzyg, how did the installations go?  Did you install Arch before the minimum memory requirement went above 128 MB?

If I remember correctly, the minimum memory requirement is now 96MB.

The installation using the CD, and the other way I explained above, works fine smile


ZzZz...

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#12 2008-08-08 16:00:41

Reploid
Member
From: Cold Country up North
Registered: 2008-03-27
Posts: 110

Re: Has anyone installed Arch with 128 MB RAM?

glad wrote:

Nope, But I'l definetly give it a try

I tried both Firefox, Opera and Konqueror with the best performance on the latter.

Thanks for advice :-)

Glad, you should definetly drop KDE for your laptop, and run openbox without a desktop manager. I am doing this on a 256MB machine right now, and it is responsive as hell. Faster than any other linux distribution I've tried so far, perhaps barring puppy linux.

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#13 2008-08-08 17:31:52

eXire
Member
Registered: 2006-08-08
Posts: 15

Re: Has anyone installed Arch with 128 MB RAM?

Currently i'm running Arch on the Toshiba Portege 3490ct laptop with 128 MB of memory. But i installed arch on it for about 1.5 years ago.

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#14 2008-08-08 17:42:05

arch0r
Member
From: From the Chron-o-John
Registered: 2008-05-13
Posts: 597

Re: Has anyone installed Arch with 128 MB RAM?

give it a try! arch base installation + openbox + some lightweight apps. you can also build your own kernel according to your hardware to get better performance results if you're an advanced linux user. 

i'm using openbox and kde4 and i never really exceeded the 300mb mark.

cool

Last edited by arch0r (2008-08-08 17:42:16)

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#15 2008-08-08 23:28:43

kclive18
Member
From: Columbus, Ohio, USA
Registered: 2008-05-08
Posts: 219

Re: Has anyone installed Arch with 128 MB RAM?

I'd run a lighter DE like fluxbox, openbox, or XFCE with that much RAM.  KDE/GNOME are meant for more modern machines that have 1GB or more.


My Rigs:
- Mid-2007 iMac 20", Intel 2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2x1GB DDR2-800, 250GB SATA HDD, and...MIGHTY MOUSE!!! tongue, OSX 10.5 Leopard, ATI Radeon 2400XT 128MB
- HP zv6203cl, AMD Athlon 64 3200 S939, 2x512MB DDR400, 80GB 4200rpm HDD, ATI Radeon Xpress 200M 128MB, Arch i686 cool
- 1986 Gibson SG Junior Cherry Red, Ibanez 15W amp, DigiTech RP250 modeling processor

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#16 2008-08-08 23:49:48

nj
Member
Registered: 2007-04-06
Posts: 93

Re: Has anyone installed Arch with 128 MB RAM?

nh wrote:

nj, thanks, that's encouraging.  How do you install the base packages in two groups?

When picking which packages to install, check half the list then install the packages. Flip over to the second terminal (alt-f2) and remove everything from /tmp to get the space back. Go back to the first terminal (alt-f1) and install the other half of the packages. The kernel takes up a large amount of space, so excluding that from the first batch might be enough. Just make sure not to repartition your disk during the second run through. You'll get some duplicate entries in /etc/fstab which are easy enough to remove. If you get any errors during installation, run df to check if the file system ran out of space.

I believe there is a ramdisk boot option to set the amount of ram used for the file system. The default was 75% I think. If you pass it a larger number, everything may work in one go.

There is also the lowmem boot option as others have mentioned. I don't know what it does. Maybe it would have made all of this work without any problems?

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#17 2008-08-09 09:36:25

nh
Member
From: England
Registered: 2008-07-09
Posts: 45

Re: Has anyone installed Arch with 128 MB RAM?

Thanks everyone.

nj, I might go for that approach if I can't get any other installation method to work.  Are duplicate fstab entries the only potential problem?  I don't know enough about Linux to be able to diagnose or fix other possible issues, so this approach will have to be a last resort for me!

Reading this thread -- lowmem boot image -- the lowmem option is not available with the latest iso.  That's a pity, but I'll give it a go anyway.  I'd love to be able to compare Arch with Xubuntu on the old laptop.

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#18 2009-11-28 15:21:50

tyakugan
Member
Registered: 2009-11-28
Posts: 2

Re: Has anyone installed Arch with 128 MB RAM?

For all other people, brought here by a search engine:

archlinux-2009.08-core-i686.iso works out of the box on my Dell Latitude L400 (with 128MB RAM).

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