Is 1 Gig Of Ram Sufficient To Drive A Linux Sysyetm?

[Mobi]

I have an old, but recently overhauled desk top which is 'clean' and has 1 gig of ram.

I am thinking of installing a linux system on it as a project.

Is 1 gig enough - I can easily get another gig added,if necessary.

Thanks for any advice

[urandom]

once my machine is up and running, it uses 57M of RAM. Using a source base distro, I build everything in RAM and rarelly use more than 1 GB. This is while browsing, compiling, ssh'ing, listening to some music... Linux is what you make of it... and here comes the big BUT (no pun intended): if this is one of your first linux experiences, I believe (and in fact I would recommend) you'll use a "ready-to-use" distro like ubuntu, mint, mandrake, <insert-your-favorite-distro>, etc... so it will come with a full desktop environnement (like gnome or kde), heavy weight apps like openoffice, etc... in that case, if you're really multitasking then you may hit the limit with 1G only and your machine will start to swap (which *ahem* sux). in conclusion, it may work without any issue except if you are used to have 50 tabs open, word processor and spreadsheets while listening to some music using a heavy player. so try it first so you can have some fun with linux, if you see you like it and use it more and more and that you hit the limit, just add some more RAM later, it takes 5 minutes and it's very cheap nowadays.

[RKASA]

I run PClinuxOS KDE4 on my Celron 1.4 single core CPU w/1gig of RAM 6 year old laptop and it works fine even when I fire up a Virtual XP at 512mb taking half the ram.

I have yet to ever see it swap - in fact in the forum the other day the ? was has anyone seen that in years.

So go for it.

[Supernova]

I have an old, but recently overhauled desk top which is 'clean' and has 1 gig of ram.

I am thinking of installing a linux system on it as a project.

Is 1 gig enough - I can easily get another gig added,if necessary.

1GB should be plenty; I run Linux Mint Debian (32-bit) with only 512MB. Memory usage also depends on the desktop environment -- with KDE being the heaviest, followed by Gnome, XFCE, LXDE. I prefer Gnome + LXDE as it's easy to navigate.

[benbear]

Yes is the simple answer, I would of thought it would run pretty well

You might need to find an old version of Ubuntu as the new Ubuntu is 32 bit or 64 but as I said,yeah, it'll run well

What AMD(processor) do you have?

Guess that don't really mater, plenty of different linux downloads on the web

Edited March 9, 2011 by benbear

[innerspace]

I have linux webservers running with 256MB and handling a lot of traffic.

However these are command line only and highly tuned with only the programs they need installed.

As mentioned above, more user friendly desktop distributions are more resource intensive - it depends what you want to use the computer for.

DSL (dam_n small linux) will run on any hardware that is less than 15-20 years old, but it has a limited number of very lightweight programs.

A great advantage of linux is the ability to run off a live cd or usb drive without having to install.

It is slower than a proper install since USB/CD speeds are limiting but it allows you to test various distributions to see how they work and which you like.

Google "pendrive linux" and download the multiboot program, allows you to put lots of linux versions on one usb drive.

[Tywais]

1 GB is fine for general use. I have a Slackware server running as firewall, dhcp server, webserver, mail server, proxy server, mySQL server, X-windows server etc. Have 1GB, using 800MB.

[urandom]

we had a ubuntu (9.10 i think) machine with 512K of RAM in office that swapped as hell... 2 firefox instances (different profiles, few tabs), openoffice, open a heavy image and boom!

Edited March 9, 2011 by urandom

[Richb2004v2]

I have a six year old desk top that has always worked well for me with XP. However recently it has become very slow for some reason. I ran anti-virus and malware software through it but there was no improvement. it is so slow as to be almost unworkable. Anyway today I tried Linux Mint from a USB pen drive and have been amazed at the difference. It is so much quicker and more responsive. Also everything seems to work. I can only imagine it will be quicker if I install it. My machine has only 512 Ram and obviously an old (AMD) processor.

I now can't decide if I should try to dual boot as every time I do I encounter some kind of glitch.

[RKASA]

I have a six year old desk top that has always worked well for me with XP. However recently it has become very slow for some reason. I ran anti-virus and malware software through it but there was no improvement. it is so slow as to be almost unworkable. Anyway today I tried Linux Mint from a USB pen drive and have been amazed at the difference. It is so much quicker and more responsive. Also everything seems to work. I can only imagine it will be quicker if I install it. My machine has only 512 Ram and obviously an old (AMD) processor.

I now can't decide if I should try to dual boot as every time I do I encounter some kind of glitch.

Once the MBR has the loader in it you should have no problem with dual booting.

For XP running slow I had a problem with the update KB971029 it is for auto run CD a security issue and every time I installed it I had to restore to get the PC to run right again. You may try a restore point before that update. It was laggy and slow and most games stopped working? Anyway if PC is used right it is not an issue so I finally just marked it for not installing and have received other updates after that just fine and the problem has gone away. worth a try.

[Supernova]

I now can't decide if I should try to dual boot as every time I do I encounter some kind of glitch.

You won't run into any problems if you install GRUB (linux bootloader) to root. Some folks will insist on a separate /boot partition, which to me is unnecessary unless you intend to run multiple distros. Create a primary partition for / (you need to do this anyway) and mark it 'active'. When asked where to install GRUB, select this partition.

[Richb2004v2]

I tried to install dual boot on my latest netbook and had the same result each time. I used the 'install system side by side with XP'. It did install but when I select which system on boot up it repeats the process twice for some reason. It means more time and is a bit annoying.

[justsumhelp]

crunchbanglinux

[tomuchrice]

For older hardware I would alway suggest CrunchBang Linux, it used to be based on ubuntu but because of stability problems which are typical for ubuntu they changed to pure debian testing.

CrunchBang is a Debian GNU/Linux based distribution offering a great blend of speed, style and substance.

http://crunchbanglinux.org/

Easy to use out of the box, great tips and tricks in their forum and a good way to lose your fear of the cli.