My laptop has 640MB of RAM. Windows XP works very well. I went to install OpenSuse. During the install, it said I need at least 1GB of RAM, or it will run slow.
I always thought Linux didn’t need as much RAM as Windows. How come SUSE needs so much RAM? (I know 1GB isn’t very much now a days, but Windows runs very, very good on my system, with the 640GB).
640MB is fine.
Plasma crashed while installing, whatever plasma is.
I clicked OK and continued with the install.
What is plasma? Not sure if spelling is right.
Chris.
It’s the desktop for KDE4 I think.
Sure you don’t have errors on your DVD or CD? Did you do a self-check before installing?
From what I remember, I checked it.
Was 11.1 supoised to come with ext4?
No, ext4 is a new filesystem still in testing. It’s KDE4 that you’re thinking of. You can also install and use KDE3.5 instead. You can even have both installed and choose which KDE you want ot use on a per-session basis.
Yep, you’re fine. 256MB is the minimum, 512 is recommended.
openSUSE 11.1: Hardware Requirements
But of course depending on what you want to run (and in general) the more the better.
And although ‘Linux’ generally is well known for it’s low system requirements, that doesn’t necessarily speak to the requirements of any specific distro. Remember, Windows XP did come out 7 years before openSUSE 11.1…so yea, openSUSE does need more RAM 
Think it’s just the fancy graphical installer that needs ‘a lot’ of RAM. openSUSE itself should run fine with 640MB of RAM with any of the desktop environments,
i use a dual boot system with suse 11 and xp.with a 512mb ram.
apart from that i use oracle database on suse and SQLdeveloper (which is a java application and hence will use a big chunk of ram) and everything runs without any problem.
and yes i use xfce as my desktop environment.but i have used kde 3.5 and kde4 and i dont think there is much of a difference in the ram utilized.
and just curious …where during the installation did suse tell that it needs 1 gb ram?? (and why didn’t my installation show me that??? 
)
Thanks for the replies.
From what I remember, right after I clicked install. Maybe not the first thing, but very soon in the process.
It said somting like, Not enough memory. This system has 575MB of ram (640 in Windows 7), will run slow or sluggish. SUSE needs at least 1GB to run.
Seems to run good tho. I will get more RAM next week. May get a new laptop.
Chris.
happydog500 wrote:
>
> Thanks for the replies.
>
> From what I remember, right after I clicked install. Maybe not the
> first thing, but very soon in the process.
>
> It said somting like, Not enough memory. This system has 575MB of ram
> (640 in Windows 7), will run slow or sluggish. SUSE needs at least 1GB
> to run.
>
> Seems to run good tho. I will get more RAM next week. May get a new
> laptop.
I loaded 11.1 with KDE3 onto an old Thinkpad with 512mb and it runs about as
well as I would expect from a 1Ghz machine. I don’t load it heavily - it’s
a maintenance device - and it rarely makes any use of the swap file.
11.0 installed on the same laptop with only 256mb of RAM, died with 128mb.
Given the price of PC133 RAM modules, the upgrade to 512 was basically
painless <g>.
–
Will Honea
Suse doesn’t really check ram during installation. It checks the available hard disk space and if it gave you a message that it needs at least 1GB, I would bet my (admittedly second hand but still working) car that it was talking about 1GB on the hard drive.
No the Live CD install, recommends 1 GiB RAM if you have less, and warns you not to run applications whilst you’re installing.
The Net or DVD install methods are recommended for those with experience, because the greater control, permits better results on more systems (and some the Live CD fails completely on).
If you only have 512 MiB RAM, you may find increasing the value of “swappiness” to 90 or 95 from 60 will help free memory from idle data pages, to reduce application page faults and increase memory useable for cacheing.
The reason for this is that the live cd runs in ram and not from the hard drive
/Geoff
Ahh that makes sense. I just assumed the OP was installing from DVD. I’d be losing that car right about now if the OP lived close by…