When we started (February 2002) the current Red Hat version was 7.2, and we worked on the hypothesis that the target system should be:
- 486/25 or better
- 16 M RAM
- 100 MB occupation for base install
- 200 MB occupation for install with X, basic apps
Somebody said we could count on disk not being smaller than 1.2 GB, but many laptops where still below that limit in the late 90′s. In practice, as the RULE test database proves, we have been able to keep productive a lot of machines with the above kind of specs, plus a not so small number of i386, until Red Hat 9. When Slinky will have been ported to Fedora Core 2 we will see what happens. In general, just try RULE on whatever i386 or greater CPU you have, and let us know what happens. Even if it doesn’t handle anything more than kernel with networking, why give up a perfectly good and up to date firewall, until it runs?