[Rule] Care to discuss favorite lightweight apps?

[C David Rigby]

On Tue, 2009-04-14 at 16:27 -0700, ml at distasis.com wrote:
> C David Rigby wrote:
> >RULE itself is no longer an active, "stand-alone" project. Most activity
> >descended from RULE takes place on the u-lite site
> 
> I noticed u-lite mentioned on the RULE mailing list and I did have a look
> at it already.  Only drawback is the documentation states minimum
> requirements of 96 MB RAM or more.  So it won't run on my laptop computer.
>  If they ever come up with a version that will install and operate on a 64
> MB machine (without Internet connection), I'd realy like to try it.
> 

Indeed. It runs on top of ubuntu's server version. Even the text-only
alternate installer for ubuntu server requires more than 64 MB of RAM. 

Some of the info below you probably already know.

Debian's text-only installer was always my low-resource favorite for
installations. The prior version, 4.x, still ran in 32 MB of RAM, IIRC.
I'm not sure about the most recent, 5.0 version code-named "lenny".
Older versions of Debian are still supported, IIRC. If you would like to
give it a try, look at the minimal installers:

http://debian.org/distrib/netinst

In particular, consider a "small CD". I believe you indicated that you
do not have a network connection on this machine. That will make a
network-based installation, usually the leanest install mechanism,
problematic.

The previous, "oldstable" version is 4.0r8 codenamed "etch". You can
check it out here:

http://debian.org/releases/etch/

Finally, if you want Free and Open Source and modern, and can tolerate
the idea of using something besides GNU/Linux, take a look at one of the
BSDs. In particular, NetBSD is an excellent choice for low-resource
systems. FreeBSD and OpenBSD are also feasible.

Once you get a base system installed, you should be able to keep it up
to date.

If you have access to a more powerful machine, you might try using a
virtual machine with its memory set to 64MB to test particular operating
systems and applications. That would be faster than constant
re-installation on your laptop. Given my lack of recent activity on
low-resource systems, though, I have not got much to share in terms of
lightweight applications experience.

Cheers
CDR