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What to do with a Hackable Linux clamshell goes on sale for $99 (LinuxDevices)What to do with a Hackable Linux clamshell goes on sale for $99 (LinuxDevices)Posted Mar 17, 2010 9:28 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753)In reply to: What to do with a Hackable Linux clamshell goes on sale for $99 (LinuxDevices) by neilbrown Parent article: Hackable Linux clamshell goes on sale for $99 (LinuxDevices) But I also wonder about the RAM size. No mainstream Linux desktop software works in 32Mb (sad but true). The UIs will probably have to text based, or use some ultra-light, non-X11 toolkits. Would increasing it to at least 128Mb bring the cost up too much? That is about what smartphones have these days.
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What to do with a Hackable Linux clamshell goes on sale for $99 (LinuxDevices) Posted Mar 19, 2010 17:42 UTC (Fri) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]
Err. I used to use RedHat Linux 5 and I can assure you that X11 software works just fine in 32 MB. I think it was using GTK 1.
That system used a 16 bit depth and 800x600 resolution on a Matrox VGA card. I think it had a 2 MB video buffer.
The Sun pizza box I used to do work on had only 16 MB RAM I think and it ran X11 and CDE.
I think the biggest problem with current software is how much of it has gone to double buffering and doing bitmap rendering in application RAM in order to look pretty.
You have to drop all that pretty double drawing, Unicode fonts, transparency and SVG icons.
But X11 was *designed* to run on things like NEC X Terminals with 2 MB of RAM.
What to do with a Hackable Linux clamshell goes on sale for $99 (LinuxDevices) Posted Mar 25, 2010 12:29 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] I too have used X11 on systems that have less power that todays pocket calculators, but that is rather beside the point. Current "off the shelf" (or "off the FTP server") X11 software needs > 200Mb to run comfortably. You have to do a huge lot of work to slim them down for the box in question, or else use very old versions (with associated bugs and security holes).There are some small-memory Linux distributions (eg. DeliLinux), but they generally are poorly maintained one-man projects, and even they nowadays typically need something like 100mb to run. Their maintainers always find at some point that adding features is more fun than serious shoehorning, or lose interest.
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