operating systems without systemd

[dzz]

Tell me as soon you find an OS which can run with 512 MB RAM, or less.

? Machines in use here with 512 ram and single-core cpu, running squeeze, wheezy, jessie, sid with xfce4, TDE, openbox.

[Linadian]

@linadian: For PCLinnuxOS there's a TDE build, too: https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/LiveCDs

Thanks, I did check it out quite some time ago, it was still fairly beta-ish back then. My only issue is, will it jive with PCLinuxOS repos? My goal is to find something long-term supported too, I just want my f#%king computer to work, without any proprietary choke-ware (virusd). Downloading it anyway, gunna give it a spin, for schizz n giggles, who knows, it may work.

If you're installing PC-BSD then there is no UFS option, they are ZFS only since several PC-BSD utilities assume ZFS is present. You could install FreeBSD with UFS and then install all the PC-BSD packages if you wanted.

However, there really isn't any reason to do that, ZFS is not a resource hog. I've been running it for years on machines with less than 2GB of RAM. In fact, I run a bunch of old used-to-be-desktops-now-file-servers with 1GB of RAM or less and they all are running with ZFS. Based on my experience you can run PC-BSD with Lumina and ZFS then the operating system will run smoothly on machines with 2GB of RAM.

That's good to know, what I said about ZFS was not my opinion/experience, it was what I read. But since you endorse it, I will give it a cold steel bricks and mortar install try anyway when PC-BSD 10.1 is released (with ALL other drives disconnected, lol), who knows, PC-BSD Lumina could be the answer to my (our?) problem (virusd). But why not just use PC-BSD Xfce (if anybody is already a fan of Xfce)? Will Xfce be caving to virusd too? In all honesty, anything BSD based would probably be the last to cave to virusd, this is also something to consider.

Tell me as soon you find an OS which can run with 512 MB RAM, or less.

I would say Salix Xfce fits this bill, it's still a very close second place in my Debhat replacement choices because it's lean (and rolling as a bonus), but at this stage of the game, both my old and new machines could handle any bloated distro, but that doesn't mean I like or will tolerate bloat, I actually don't like it (hence my disgust of KDE now), I hate being 'smothered'. PC-BSD remains a distant 3rd choice because I'm not sure I'm ready to make the jump to BSD yet, binary availability and a whole new tweaking learning curve (and I'm still a little miffed its installer wiped an old storage drive). FreeBSD 10.1 is really cool...if you have the time and patience to set it up and trouble-shoot it, which I don't, but I'm not throwing away the DVD just yet.

[fruitofloom]

Tell me as soon you find an OS which can run with 512 MB RAM, or less.

? Machines in use here with 512 ram and single-core cpu, running squeeze, wheezy, jessie, sid with xfce4, TDE, openbox.

Well: I got machines with more ram too.
Thing is: none of them uses more than +/- 300 (with claws, firefox, pidgin and tilda running). Most of that being used by firefox, of course.
Not that sure what would be the point to get more ram .... so that more sits idle?

[golinux]

Not that sure what would be the point to get more ram .... so that more sits idle?

That's easy. Maybe size does matter! As in mine is bigger (therefore better) than yours. A geek's compensation for lack of self-esteem.

[saulgoode]

Well: I got machines with more ram too.
Thing is: none of them uses more than +/- 300 (with claws, firefox, pidgin and tilda running). Most of that being used by firefox, of course.
Not that sure what would be the point to get more ram .... so that more sits idle?

Linux will use any available spare RAM for caching disk blocks. This can greatly speed reloading of programs, libraries, and data files.

For example:

Code: Select all

root@thevenin:~# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           428        406         22          0        215        129
-/+ buffers/cache:         60        368
Swap:          534          0        534

root@thevenin:~# echo 3 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

root@thevenin:~# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           428         35        393          0          0          9
-/+ buffers/cache:         26        402
Swap:          534          0        534

root@thevenin:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=hundredmb bs=1M count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 0.766156 s, 137 MB/s

root@thevenin:~# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           428        137        291          0          0        109
-/+ buffers/cache:         27        400
Swap:          534          0        534

root@thevenin:~# time cat hundredmb >/dev/null # with file cached in spare RAM
real    0m0.192s
user    0m0.001s
sys     0m0.176s

root@thevenin:~# echo 3 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

root@thevenin:~# time cat hundredmb >/dev/null # file must be reloaded from the disk
real    0m1.927s
user    0m0.003s
sys     0m0.226s


[RU55EL]

Tell me as soon you find an OS which can run with 512 MB RAM, or less.

Puppy Linux - but you were probably expecting this answer.

Humor doesn't seem to work well ...
My point was that 2 Gigs is anything but low. Obviously that opinion is slightly old-fashioned.
I wouldn't hesitate to run any OS out there on a machine with 1 Gig of Ram.
Well: to say it more clear, to me a Gig sounds like quite comfortable.

But thanks for your answer, my fault not being clear. Puppy is fine too, of course.

OK, sorry, I didn't realize that you were being humorus.

Ironically, I'm posting this from an old "obsolete" WinXP computer with 2 Gigs of ram. Funny, it seems to perform just fine running Debian.

[fruitofloom]

Well: I got machines with more ram too.
Thing is: none of them uses more than +/- 300 (with claws, firefox, pidgin and tilda running). Most of that being used by firefox, of course.
Not that sure what would be the point to get more ram .... so that more sits idle?

Linux will use any available spare RAM for caching disk blocks. This can greatly speed reloading of programs, libraries, and data files.

For example:

Code: Select all

root@thevenin:~# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           428        406         22          0        215        129
-/+ buffers/cache:         60        368
Swap:          534          0        534

root@thevenin:~# echo 3 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

root@thevenin:~# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           428         35        393          0          0          9
-/+ buffers/cache:         26        402
Swap:          534          0        534

root@thevenin:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=hundredmb bs=1M count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 0.766156 s, 137 MB/s

root@thevenin:~# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           428        137        291          0          0        109
-/+ buffers/cache:         27        400
Swap:          534          0        534

root@thevenin:~# time cat hundredmb >/dev/null # with file cached in spare RAM
real    0m0.192s
user    0m0.001s
sys     0m0.176s

root@thevenin:~# echo 3 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

root@thevenin:~# time cat hundredmb >/dev/null # file must be reloaded from the disk
real    0m1.927s
user    0m0.003s
sys     0m0.226s


Thanks for the answer and an elaborate one too.
I heard something simlar before, but didn't understand the short version of it.
700 mb of ram are not enough to cache data?
Or, for the ones who consider a 2 Gig machine low-resources, 1700 mb ?
I got all kind of machines, from 64 up to 4 Gigs. Between 512 and 4 Gigs i don't see much of a difference (but then: i usually do one thing, finish it, and then do the next thing. I seldom open a file, close it, open another file, close that and open the first one again ... same for programs. I usually just start the 4 i use and let them run).

Last question: Is t here a point where it doesn't make any sense anymore? Is 16 Gig enough, or 32? 64 ? Or is it always better to have more ram?
(My actual ram is as big as the harddisk of one of my elder laptops .... ).

I am really fine with my "speed", hence i won't get more ram anyway.


I am asking seriously for your opinion.

[fruitofloom]

More short:
You, saulgoode, think too that 2 Gigs is not enough?
Even though 5+ years ago 512 was pretty common and most were very happy with it.
(We already had modern browsers and modern DE's back then).

[NkfzGx3ok]

More short:
You, saulgoode, think too that 2 Gigs is not enough?
Even though 5+ years ago 512 was pretty common and most were very happy with it.
(We already had modern browsers and modern DE's back then).

You have to keep in mind this is your use case and not everyone can survive on that.
I use my home machine for work related tasks (I guess this is where the survive comes in) and when setting the build roots going I can start gobbling 70% of my 64GiB RAM easy, if I do some modelling work as well as having a whole bunch of related things open (blender, 3dsmax, CAD, several VM's) I can do the same. I may be an extreme case here but many people I know have a whole bunch of applications open for media, a fckload of tabs open in several browsers and need at least 4GiB to work use it all comfortably.

[fruitofloom]

Wondering what they did 5 years ago. Not to speak of 10.
Or back in the days when Eric Raymond considered 64 MB to be "plenty of, where you barely need swap".
Perhaps people didn't work ... ?

To work one sure needs round the lines of 40 tabs open in a browser. Mainly facebook, twitter and other social media, i guess.

[saulgoode]

700 mb of ram are not enough to cache data?
Or, for the ones who consider a 2 Gig machine low-resources, 1700 mb ?

Since I cleared my caches last night, I have built up nearly 3GB of cached blocks. This is largely owing to having done some large compiles and it means that repeating such compiles will result in disk accesses being an order of magnitude faster (I imagine the kernel devs optimized disk caching for just this use case, which is important for them). I've also used some larger programs such as GIMP and Libre Office, and running them again means they will load twice as fast (or faster).

Last question: Is t here a point where it doesn't make any sense anymore? Is 16 Gig enough, or 32? 64 ? Or is it always better to have more ram?

In general, more RAM is better. The only reasons not to want more RAM is 1) the cost or 2) there is sufficient RAM for the machine to perform its duties. As to the latter, the machine shown in my previous post ("thevenin") has only 400MB but since it is a print server, this is more than sufficient. It can even run a window manager and allow me to open the documents in my printer room. I see no need to add any more memory.

For my other workstations, I tend to cram as much RAM into them as I can, while doing so cheaply. This currently happens to be 4GB for the desktops and 1Gb for the laptops. At this point, while getting more RAM might be desirable, I think adding SSD drives would be more cost effective (ten times the storage for the same price). I would expect the speed benefits of SSD would virtually eliminate the benefit of disk caching; and would not be dependent upon the files having been previously accessed. I haven't yet decided to add any SSDs (I am very stingy when it comes to computers).

I am really fine with my "speed", hence i won't get more ram anyway.

I personally don't make purchasing RAM a high priority. Most of my machines are "discards" from friends or family and are more than five years' old. I generally upgrade the processor (for example, from a Celeron to a Core2duo) and try to get the RAM up to at least 2GB. With these two improvements, costing only about $10-20, I end up with some fairly decent machines. But that's just me.

[ashindeed]

Thanks for this thread, highly informative.

I recently installed Gentoo and was successful in my attempt, thanks to their handbook. From my perspective, Gentoo is more difficult to set-up compared to Debian. I will see how I can manage it in the long run, I have found the Gentoo forum to be helpful too.

[fruitofloom]

thanks saulgoode for the elaborate answer.

In the end it looks as if our specs would be the same though .... And even the expactations
(i still wouldn't call a 1 Gig low specs, but that is really just about giving a name)

I ain't got problems with the cost. Simply looks as if my machines would do anything (and as i have around 10 machines, it doesn't make sense to upgrade the really bad ones. I simply use the good ones, and of those i don't even use all).

I bought 2 machines, the rest is "discards" too (some of them having 2 Gigs of Ram, dual-core, etc).

The brutal truth: i understand shit of cached blocks.

Short version: thanks for your answer.

[Linadian]

The new PC-BSD 10.1 stable release is out, release announcement here. I've been waiting for this, dying to give it a test install on my old machine (single dedicated HDD install, bootloader on MBR of same drive, using BIOS F12 to switch between OSes/boots).

I asked in the PC-BSD forum about fakeraid, they said ZFS and fakeraid are not a good idea, susceptible to file system corruption.

On a more cheery note, Debian dev voters may see some sense after all, "General Resolution: init system coupling" vote details here.

[twoflowers]

I'm interested in your findings with ZFS, as I'm just evaluating it because of its ability to detect silent bit corruption.

I spent a good part of yesterday at persuading the installer to use MBR partitiond scheme with ZFS 'cause I'd like to have wheezy on that system, too. Well, I failed, it's FreeBSD only now on that system. Anyway, not having a comfortable fallback is most likly the better way to go,