how much ram needed for linux?

[dsa1971]

I currently have pclinuxos installed on an emachine that is a few years old It has 2 sticks of the 64mb rdram in it now. It's a little sluggish. I'm considering adding 2 more sticks of 64mb rdram to get it to 256mb. I would try to increase the ram even more but the rdram is somewhat pricey and I'm not that interested in spending that much money on the computer I'm setting up to learn a little linux.

 

[BlueWeasel]

The desktop manager you are using generally governs the amount of RAM you need. KDE (the one PCLOS uses) and Gnome require more RAM to run decently that other desktops. Other lightweight desktops like XFCE4, Fluxbox, IceWM, etc., would run much better on your system.

 

[Crusty]

It all depends on what you are trying to do with Linux. If you want a GUI and multitasking I would say 256mb is a minimum.

 

[TGS]

I can vouch for a nice 512MB setup. I'm not sure how much your budget is though. Your memory requirements are all based on the amount of services you are running, along with the apps you are running.

As long as you aren't running a lot of apps I could see a lightweight distro doing well on 256MB. If you want to cut back on more memory, try a slimmer desktop manager like XFCE or Fluxbox. You lose a little bit of the flashy desktop but it's much easier on memory.

Dang choices...

Edit: Damnit I'm getting slow in my young age...

 

[nweaver]

I just moved my lappy to xfce4 from gnome (running on gentoo). It's a P3 500 w/256 megs, and ran VERY sluggish (when in gnome, which was rarely). XFCE4 is a very nice wm and snappy on the older h/w.