I don't usually, but... 10034

snips

Having done it more than once, yes.

Depends. You want, say, Gnome or KDE, memory is going to be an issue - or performance is. Generally speaking, in Linux, you can do pretty much anything on pretty much anything, if you're willing to take a performance hit.

Now, switch that around a little, drop in icewm or some other lightweight, and you get a quite happily functioning desktop with minimal resource hogging. 48Mb is quite usable for such a setup, though some of the larger apps may take a while to load. Given the inended use of the systems, though, the choice between slow and simply doing without, entirely, slow wins hands down.

16Mb is tight, to be sure, but should be doable. The big thing is to avoid the heavy desktops and to ensure you're not running a lot of other stuff you probably don't really need. Kill extraneous services, etc.

As an example of that, this machine I'm working on right now has 96Mb in it, running Win2K. With the default settings and the few auto-loading things I've got installed (AVG, basically), system load was well over 100Mb. Simply disabling unnecessary services reduced that to a little over 80Mb. Right now, with AVG running and Gravity (the news client) running, load is 88Mb.

Just by disabling the unnecessary crud, the system went from terminal thrashing to actually usable. Same concept applies.

Depends what you're running, really. I wouldn't drop KDE on such a system, then expect any performance. I would drop, say, icewm or sawfish, etc, on it and fully expect to be able to run FireFox, but then I wouldn't be sucking up the entire system resources just for the desktop manager.

That said, even so, 16Mb is very tight. 32Mb is doable, 48Mb is a realistic minimum. Nice thing about what we're doing is that for every three or four machines we get in, we can produce two usable systems; there's little benefit in shipping 4 16Mb machines rather than two 32Mb machines. The cost of delivery alone mandates that we balance quanbreasty and quality, so we do make every system count... but we can still deliver workable, usable machines with current software as long as we don't try to use Windows.