16M RAM enough for FreeBSD 6.1?

[Nikolas Britton]

On 8/26/06, Nikolas Britton <nikolas.britton at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/26/06, Torfinn Ingolfsen <torfinn.ingolfsen at broadpark.no> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have an old laptop, a Compaq Armada 1580DMT, with 16M RAM, 2GB hd,
> > floppy and CD-rom. It doesn't have built in networking, neither wired
> > nor wireless. It does have PC card slots. It has had FreeBSD 4.9-release
> > installed a long time, and was recently upgraded to 4.11-release from
> > CD, sucessfully.
> >
> > However, I would like better pccard support, ie. 32 bit cardbus and
> > wireless network cards, so I would like to install 6.1-release (or
> > -stable) on it.
>
> How do you know it has CardBus / PCMCIA 2.1 / JEIDA 4.2? have you
> checked? This standard was introduced in 1995.
>
> > However, when I try the 6.1-release CD (CD1), it boots as far as
> > loading the kernel, botting the kernel, and then reboots again??
> >
> > I have also tried 6.0-release, and 7.0-current (both July 06 and Aug 06
> > snapshots) with the same results.
> >
> > Are 16 Megs of RAM to little to install FreeBSD 6.0 or newer?
>
> Yep. Try DragonFly BSD, it's based on FreeBSD 4.x code so it should be
> able to cope with an antique such as this. NetBSD would also be a good
> choice. I would say at least 32MB for FreeBSD 6.x... my FreeBSD
> 6.1-STABLE kernel is using 52MB (I think I have debugging enabled
> though).
>

Ok I checked three other 6.x boxes. Dmesg reports the kernel using
35MB, 34MB, and 19MB of RAM at system startup. Top reports 297MB,
38MB, 167MB, and 621MB active... The two largest numbers are running
X11/KDE and the two smallest numbers are servers.


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