[ale] ARM CPU devices, linux capable, cheap

[JD]

On 08/12/2011 01:18 PM, Rich Faulkner wrote:
> I am far from an Ubuntu pro but I've been using it a lot lately and
> doing builds for various people on a variety of platforms.  1GB RAM is a
> basic figure you can count on for most recent releases of Ubuntu.  My
> student installed 10.10 on an IBM Thinkcenter last night which had 768MB
> RAM w/a Celeron 1.8 (I think).  It won't win races but it does run.
> 
> Attempts at running recent releases on anything less than that has not
> had good results so I shoot for 1GB as a base on memory.  
> 
> My current desktop (refurb'd HP xw4600 w/dual-core 2.6ish w/4GB RAM,
> 1024GB Nvidia GPU running 10.10 from a WD 10K Raptor) boots in 15
> seconds flat.  A far cry better than my old Fedora 12 build that I just
> retired.
> 
> I generally look at RAM as first consideration then CPU and keep an open
> mind toward something other than Ubuntu if a real legacy system.  
> 

Mom runs LUbuntu on a 1G Pentium4 happily.  I've run a Debian on a 128M
ARM for 3.5 yrs and it worked pretty well multitasking 4 apps at a time
like GPS, music playback and rsync over ssh plus whatever I was actively
doing with it (responding to emails etc...).

A properly configured Linux will easily fit and be useful in 64MB, don't
confuse all the bloat that is common in the current mainstream distros
as being something that running Linux demands.  TinyCore shows how
bloated even Puppy or DSL are.