Bollocks. We’re not talking about Vista here… 
openSUSE can run decently in 256-384 MB of RAM, I say this because I’ve used it on these lower-pegged systems. Unless, of course, you’re using Gnome… 
512MB is definitely the sweet spot, and 1GB+ is luxury. But recommending 1GB is a little bit overkill.
Just my 2c…
Cheers,
KV
Seriously with that computer you should do fine. If you are really out to learn linux then it would probably be best to go without any kind of X or GUI and learn what is under the hood first. GUI can just confuse sometimes, and yast works great and a lot faster with ncurses imho.
Wasnt novell making some kind of barebone install, where afterwards you can compile whatever extras you want ? ( I cant wait for this to come out) susejeos or something like that? Although last I remember it wasnt quite yet finished and still in beta phase?
-Good luck
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The Just enough OS (JeOS) stuff for SLES is in beta and available from
download.novell.com. The same may exist for opensuse… I don’t know.
Good luck.
idshark wrote:
| Seriously with that computer you should do fine. If you are really out
| to learn linux then it would probably be best to go without any kind of
| X or GUI and learn what is under the hood first. GUI can just confuse
| sometimes, and yast works great and a lot faster with ncurses imho.
|
| Wasnt novell making some kind of barebone install, where afterwards you
| can compile whatever extras you want ? ( I cant wait for this to come
| out) susejeos or something like that? Although last I remember it wasnt
| quite yet finished and still in beta phase?
|
| -Good luck
|
|
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I’ve managed to get SuSE 11.0 (KDE4) and 10.3(KDE 3.x.x) running comfortably in these specs:
I’ve had to use one or two workarounds (acpi=force, 99sound bash script for sound after suspend etc.) to get it running perfectly.
I can recommend that, although 256MB of RAM is sufficient, you may wish to opt for 512MB of RAM as it will compensate for CPU overhead.
I just finished installing 11.0 on a 800MHz Celeron with 256MB RAM, from the LiveCD no less. Works fine. When I look at the RAM usage with free, the resident portion used is around 120MB. But no doubt more RAM will be good.
If you are building a new machine, there’s no excuse not to get at least 1GB, I don’t even think you can get 256MB sticks any more. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use 11.0 with less RAM.
I have a box that is a dual PIII 933 with 1GB of ram and it is running 10.3 quite well. A tad slow when opening apps, but once open they run just fine.
Oh yeah, running KDE too. 
I’ve had 10.3 working fine on a PIII 700Mhz system GX110 with 512MB Ram and running KDE 3.5. Looked REEEEAL nice on my 20" widwscreen monitor it shared with the Windows XP box.
dragonbite wrote:
> I’ve had 10.3 working fine on a PIII 700Mhz system GX110 with 512MB Ram
> and running KDE 3.5. Looked REEEEAL nice on my 20" widwscreen monitor
> it shared with the Windows XP box.
I’ve got 2 of those machines, one with 384MB RAM, one with 512. Both run
either 10.3 or 11.0 just fine but I had to update the BIOS. Only
difference with the 384MB machine is that you have to be a little careful
how much you load it - too much swap will drag it down real quick.
–
Will Honea
There is a page in openSUSE’s wiki on this question, see:
MiniSUSE - Test openSUSE on Minimal Hardware - openSUSE
And another page about the same problem:
Installation with Little Memory - openSUSE
I would myself install some other distro, maybe Slackware or Debian in a box that old. One thing to remember is, that the live CD’s and graphical installers demand nowadays a lot of memory. Install the system with a real installation media and a text-based installer.
Did I mention Slackware?
Well I stand corrected. I installed openSUSE 11.0 on my 6+ year old PC this weekend and I have to say, it runs great! I think it is a little faster that openSUSE 10.3, and configuring all the multimedia with the 1 Click Install worked flawlessly.
I cannot enable the Compiz because I am having trouble installing the legacy Nvida drivers. I’ll have to search the forum during work hours for ideas. I enabled VNC and vsftpd using YAST and then tested this morning from work using Windows XP. I was amazed how easy these services installed and configured first time through. I really thought I would have to go back home and make a change to my PC.
I was hesitating on purchasing openSUSE 11.0 because my PC is old, and the PC I want is way too expensive right now. But since everything is working better than I thought, I plan on purchasing openSUSE 11.0 this month.