Tiny Core Linux 7.0 [LWN.net]

Tiny Core Linux 7.0

Posted Jan 28, 2016 8:56 UTC (Thu) by mlankhorst (subscriber, #52260)
Parent article: Tiny Core Linux 7.0

> Core, weighing in at 10MB, is a command-line only experience that will run on 46MB of RAM and an ancient i486DX processor.

I didn't know there were i486's with 46 mb memory! Mine only had 4.

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Tiny Core Linux 7.0

Posted Jan 28, 2016 11:12 UTC (Thu) by petur (guest, #73362) [Link] (2 responses)

Indeed, my DX2 had 24MB, which was already exceptional. And it ran Windows 2000 pretty well....

Tiny Core Linux 7.0

Posted Jan 28, 2016 12:50 UTC (Thu) by james (guest, #1325) [Link]

The Cyrix 6x86 was a 486 compatible (and not Pentium compatible). One of those could quite plausibly have taken 48 MB of RAM: my K5 ended up with that much.

Tiny Core Linux 7.0

Posted Feb 4, 2016 12:25 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

Windows 2000 required 32MB and a Pentium processor.

Tiny Core Linux 7.0

Posted Jan 28, 2016 18:10 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (guest, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

My old IBM PS2 8595 had a 486DX2 on a processor complex board and 64MB of RAM, pretty smoking fast.

Tiny Core Linux 7.0

Posted Jan 29, 2016 10:55 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

Yay PS/2! I had a tricked-out model 8580 with Blue Lightning CPU (IBM's 486DX clone) and some weird amount of memory like 52 megabytes scattered across the motherboard ('planar' in IBM-speak) and a motley assortment of memory cards in 32-bit MCA bus slots. It ran Slackware pretty well.

Tiny Core Linux 7.0

Posted Feb 2, 2016 19:25 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

Depending on the "generation" they could either max out at 32 MB or 64 MB... but I am not sure many motherboards were built to really do that. I think one of the 486 servers we had did have 64 MB of ram in it but it was very very expensive.

Tiny Core Linux 7.0

Posted Feb 4, 2016 13:24 UTC (Thu) by curaga (guest, #106812) [Link]

There are 486 processors (clones) being actively made, because the patents have expired. See the Vortex series for one, they can take 1 or 2 GB of RAM.