a trimmed installation for older hardware with 16mb ram?

[jmurphy]

The Sarge installation manual states that 24Mb of RAM is needed for a non-desktop system, yet previous releases of Debian have used much less memory, and included options for low-memory installations. Some specialized distributions (even one or two patterned loosely on Debian) have been made for older machines with memory constraints, but they lack many of the nice features of the Debian distro. Is the memory requirement in the installation manual conservative, erring on the side of having more than enough memory? Does anyone know of a way to install a stripped-down Debian on an older machine with 16Mb RAM? Either Sarge or an older release that is still useful? Hopefully with a economical version of X windows?

[anon]

I don't think cramming debian (any version) into 16mb ram will result in a useful setup. Google tells me you should be able to install the previous release aka woody (oldstable) with 16 mb ram. It still has a few months of security support. I was under the impression that you needed a lot more ram for sarge (as in, it wouldn't install with 32 megs) and note that this is just to run the installer, an actual running system might require less but 16mb would probably be far from useful even if you could get it running. Woody only has xfree86 4.1 (as i recall) the smaller 3.3 and svga build was removed because it had known security problems that debian was unable to fix by itself, no one else supported them, but if this machine isn't internet connected maybe you can find the old version somwhere.