On my laptop (Dell P1 16M) I can run a hd-install, and with jwm, and icons turned off, I idle at ~6-7M used if I turn the swap off. With swap on it's usually roughly half and half.
I've yet to successfully boot a frugal or poormans install, the ramdisk doesn't load properly. I don't know if its because of how little ram I have or something else but I never did get to the bottom of it. HD install works fine, grub install script didn't work for me so I had to use lilo.Here's some Libretto tricks, using the Puppy distro. Might be something useful here for the OP.
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Puppy on 32 meg RAM Toshiba Libretto I've just finished fine tuning the setup on my Toshiba Libretto 50CT. My 50CT is a thin paperback novel size Pentium 75, 32 meg, 2.1 gig hard drive palmtop computer. Libretto article
Can a 16 MB pentium MMX 166 be used to run DSL and use it as a jukebox/player ?Ajan: it is likely that it is possible to play MP3s. However it is unlikely that you will be able to play them at full quality. I have an old 486 laptop at 75 mhz with 24 megs of RAM. Runs windows 98. I can use WinAmp to play MP3s, but I have to downsample them in order to get any kind of player performance out of it. Downsample to 11khz (about the quality of AM radio), and you can listen to music while running internet explorer.
How this will work in Damn Small Linux, I don't know. I believe that XMMS has a way to downsample music. I recommend you start with XMMS. If you get any chop, first kill the GUI stuff- like scrolling file info, the mixer, the equalizer screen, any shaddowing, icon animation etc. This will reduce CPU load. Then start killing off quality- look for an option like half-fidelity.
Finally look around for your sound chip and double check it is supported under Linux- the ALSA page is a great resource for this. Sometimes laptops can use funky sound systems that aren't supported as well under Linux.
Last thing: no way to be sure DSL will like having only 16 megs RAM- you will be cutting it close in any event. I highly recommend you get some swap space on that machine and install DSL as quickly as you can.Now, I've DSL running on a Toshiba 230 cx (16M RAM, 133Mhz, 1 GB HD) and it seems to be happy there with the hd-install. If you want to run DSL in your laptop you should use "mem=16M" to avoid seg faults, have a swap partition (mine 40 MB) and before install, pay attention if "mkdir /ramdisk/tmp" fails, because if it did you'll have to remove "tmp" link in "/ " and create a folder named "tmp" -> "mkdir tmp" instead of the link. In this way dsl-hdinstall will work fine. Good luck.:)Next Page...
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