Reducing Fedora memory footprint?

[Kevin Kofler]

John Reiser <jreiser <at> BitWagon.com> writes:
> The RULE Project (Run Up2date Linux Everywhere) has an installer "slinky"
> http://www.fzk.at/SLINKY/  that can install Fedora Core 5 in 32MB RAM.
> I did it in 64MB on a PentiumMMX-166 in about 3.5 hours.  Starting OpenOffice
> took two minutes, but typing and mousing was fine.

That's probably the best solution for fresh installs. For upgrades, apt-get 
dist-upgrade will get you through. I guess yum or smart will also work. That's 
also the way to get FC6 until Slinky is updated for it.

For my laptop (160 MB RAM), what I did was:
* install FC2 (back when it was current), an almost minimal install 
(essentially minimal+KDE) over HTTP worked
* upgrade to FC5 using Anaconda when that was current - not a nice experience, 
Anaconda just hung when reading in the metadata for the second ISO, requiring a 
restart, and so on; at least, it didn't crash during a transaction and leave 
duplicated packages around (i.e. I was lucky)
* upgrade to FC6 using apt-get dist-upgrade. No hickups other than that I had 
to rpm --rebuilddb afterwards, it's probably the same "corrupted RPM database" 
bug there's already a thread about on one of the lists. (It also hits some yum 
or Anaconda users.)

        Kevin Kofler