Tiny Core Linux 13 Released: Needs Just 46MB of RAM, 50MB of Disk | Hacker News Reader

Tiny Core Linux 13 Released: Needs Just 46MB of RAM, 50MB of Disk

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58 pointsem3rgent0rdr26 comments

In the early 80's, I worked for our local school district on Prime minicomputers. They supported something like 64 terminal users (up to 96 at one point), payroll, budgeting, student records, 2 simultaneous computer science labs of maybe 15 terminals each (a "port selector" allowed hooking up 96 lines on the terminal side and 32 or something on the computer side), the programming staff (around 8), 2 line printers running all day/evening, and had less than 8MB of RAM in the system - a Prime 4050 at the end.

For disk storage, we had a 600MB, 300MB, and 770MB drive to store all the data above and daily attendance records for every high school kid.

This machine ran COBOL, Fortran, PL/I, Basic, source-level debugger, and Emacs with a Multics-style paged + segmented architecture.

Not saying it was all super-fast, and we did have to manage resources. For example, large payroll or budgeting jobs ran out of a batch queue, they had lower priority than terminals, etc. But in hindsight it seems rather amazing what got done on an 8MB system.

Just wanted to note that at the time Linux appeared back in the 90's, 46MB would have been an insanely large amount of RAM. (And so it still is today in the majority of embedded situations.)

Agreed. Nice perspective. Our first home computer was a Windows 3.1 machine, which had 16MB of RAM IIRC... Even if I recall incorrectly, it definitely wasn't 48Megs.

I had a friend with Cyrix 6x86 MMX which had 32 MB of RAM.

That was a large amount of memory for a Windows 3.1 machine. 8MB systems were still common in the 95/98 days.

You may be right... it may have been only 8. It was a while ago (obviously) and I was a kid who didn't really commit these things to memory very well. I do remember that we had to open up SYSTEM.INI in notepad and comment out some of the Windows internals and reboot the machine just to have enough ram to play Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.

Used to boot Linux from a 1.2 MB 5 1/4" floppy with the kernel, network drivers, shell, and X Windows server on an i386 with 8 MB RAM. Made for a perfectly fine X terminal.

In the snow. Uphill.

With a one button mouse, no less.

going both ways on the X-axis.

Definitely. My first Linux box was a 386-SX/20 mhz with 3 megs of RAM (1 on the motherboard, 2 expansion.) Originally I was running Coherent, a closed-source Unix clone.

By '97 or so, I had a whopping 32 megs on a Pentium 100.

Came here to say the same thing. You could run X with Netscape in 12 Megs of RAM.

I remember running X on Linux on a system with 20 megs of ram.

I Wonder how much is bloat and how much is trading memory use for speed. And the obvious part of 64-bit Vs 32-bit...

Yep, I’ve used freesco linux which was installed on 1.44mb floppy. I’ve used it for routing internet for a few neighbors, to lower the cost of expensive dsl line.

Could you recommend a Linux distro that runs on computers with less than 46MB of RAM?

OpenBSD once the kernel is slimmed down.

OpenWRT still mostly works with 8MB flash and 32MB RAM, but it works better with twice that.

And by late 90's 46MB would be so-so for Windows 98.

This has been my go-to distro on an old Thinkpad T42 for several years. Loaded packages are listed line-by-line in a single file (onboot.lst), so it's really easy to return to a clean system when needed -- just by deleting the lines with unwanted extensions. This is probably my most favorite feature of TC. I usually just boot with a few essential extensions (wifi, framebuffer device, text editor etc) and load additional packages later, only in case they are needed.

The Corebook gives a great overview of the system: http://tinycorelinux.net/book.html

A point: NetBSD would still run fine under a Pentium and 48-64MB of RAM once you make the kernel smaller.

It does run, not even sure if you need to slim down the kernel (I managed to find 128MB of RAM for my P166, 3 years ago it was enough for the regular installer).

It was nice to run modern software on it, it was an ok-ish terminal, the CPU struggled (a lot) with default SSH cryptography and the graphical mode was not of much use, but it supported the serial mouse, which is nice

Worth noting that chromium & firefox are in the packages list [1].

[1] http://tinycorelinux.net/13.x/x86_64/tcz/

TBH i don't think they will fit in 50 MB disk space.

Does is still have the horrible dock? A plain FLWM or Fluxbox would be better.

You can always use { c,v}tvm. Also fvwm is the best.

This is awesome engineering. Efficiency should be more highly prized!

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