[ale] Mem. reqs. for RH9 (and other distros)

[Fulton Green]

Red Hat released Red Hat Linux 9 (RH9) today:
   http://www.RedHat.com/software/linux/
though I think it'll be awhile before ISOs are *reasonably* downloadable
if you're not a paying RHN subscriber.

But that's not the point of this note.  Instead, it's about the machine
requirements:
   http://www.RedHat.com/software/linux/technical/

Does anyone else find it interesting that even the *text* mode now
requires up to 64 MB of RAM?

If anyone has any insight on this (that means you, Chris Ricker :), I'd
love to hear it.  I can only guess that the new threading stuff bumped
up the memory usage.

Or, perhaps, RH8 also required 64 MB minimum, though I remember a time
when RHL only req'd 32 MB.

I may just give this a go anyway on my *six*-year-old 90 MHz laptop with
a sparse 24 MB of memory, but if the installation chokes, what would be
a more "forgiving" distro?  I was thinking Slackware, but perhaps Debian
can handle older machines like this as well.  I would imagine there are
one or two other distros out there specifically tuned for this situation.

At the very least, maybe I could turn the machine into a network appliance
of some sort.

TIA
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