16M RAM enough for FreeBSD 6.1?

[Oliver Fromme]

Torfinn Ingolfsen wrote:
 > Are 16 Megs of RAM to little to install FreeBSD 6.0 or newer?

As others have pointed out, installation via sysinstall
requires at least 24 MB of RAM.  So you either have to
prepare your own installation media, or put the harddisk
in a different PC, install FreeBSD there, and move the
disk back.

In any case you should carefully tune your kernel confi-
guration to only include those things that you really need.
There are also options to exclude certain parts, e.g. the
syscons driver has seveal options to exclude copy&paste,
font loading and other things, which can save some space.
Don't forget to configure plenty of swap space; you'll
probably need it.  And have a look at the tuning(7) man
page which has several hints that may help for low-memory
situations.

If you want to run X11 (a current version of Xorg), you
absolutely must upgrade the RAM.  You won't be happy with
16 MB only.  But even with more RAM, running X11 won't be
much fun, because the CPU isn't very fast, I guess.

If you want to run a light-weight graphical web browser,
I recommend links (in X11 graphics mode, option "-g") or
dillo.  Both are available from the ports collection.
They support only limited JavaScript, though, and no
Flash, Java or anything more advanced.

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme,  secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing
Dienstleistungen mit Schwerpunkt FreeBSD: http://www.secnetix.de/bsd
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and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way.

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