Re: [gtkmm] Fedora Core 2

[Robert <morelli cs utah edu>]

On Fri, 2004-09-10 at 17:09, Chris Vine wrote:
> On Friday 10 September 2004 06:24, Robert wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> 
> > There are about a million other things that cause FC 2 to crash,
> > freeze,  or become unusable.  In addition,  it frequently misconfigures
> > hardware ... etc.,  etc.,  etc.,  etc.,  etc..  I could go on for a long
> > time.  In addition to the instability,  Fedora Core 2 is
> > extremely resource intensive.  According to the FC 2 website,  the
> > minimum recommended ram for a system with Gnome is 256 MB with 512 MB
> > recommended.  I can confirm that this is correct.  My 512 MB system is
> > usually very close to exhausting all physical ram,  even though I do
> > nothing remarkable.  (A Windows 2000 system doing similar things would
> > typically use about 200 MB ram in my experience.)
> 
> I have run GNOME in 64MB at a push, and in 128MB of RAM comfortably.
> 
> The Fedora website says this:
> 
> "Memory Requirements
> This section lists the memory required to install Fedora Core 2.
> 
>     * Minimum for text-mode: 64MB
>     * Minimum for graphical: 192MB
>     * Recommended for graphical: 256MB"
> 
> As it happens, this makes no reference to Gnome and is probably connected with 
> other software, such as Open Office or Mozilla (although I would be surprised 
> if Mozilla required that much).  It certainly must be using something fairly 
> exotic if 64MB is required for text mode (I have a text mode computer here 
> running happily with 16MB of RAM doing various background tasks). 
> 
> I therefore strongly suspect you are talking complete rubbish, but I will 
> defer to you if you can provide the reference to a minimum recommended amount 
> of RAM of 256MB and 512MB RAM recommended in order to use GNOME.  URL please?

The original poster is referring to 64 bit FC 2,  whose release notes 
are at
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/index-x86_64.html
where it is stated as
"Memory Requirements
This section lists the memory required to install Fedora Core 2.

   * Minimum for text-mode: 128MB
   * Minimum for graphical: 256MB
   * Recommended for graphical: 512MB"

In fact,  the FC 2 release notes for all the FC 2 releases used to list
these same memory requirements,  but recently they lowered them for the
32 bit version (on what basis,  I can't say).  In fact,  it's even 
worse,  because they used to have two different web pages that listed 
memory requirements and they were listed differently on them ... 
anyway,  this is only and indication that the FC 2 project may not
be totally coherent.

In any case,  minimum and recommended memory requirements for an OS
are not a very well defined concept,  so a factor of two is well
within the bounds of subjective judgement.  On the other hand,  I've
used many graphical operating systems over the years and in my
experience,  FC 2 is by far the most memory intensive.  You can
debate forever about how to measure memory use,  but when your
system starts swapping constantly when you're doing nothing 
remarkable on a 384 MB system,  it's a bad situation however you
measure it.