Comments on: Also not a joke: XFCE on 39Mb

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 03 May 2011 04:29:14 +0000

Looks like VLC with the GUI is compiled in now and working under X.

By: James

James — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 22:45:11 +0000

I’ve just tried this distro for a particular project. Alpine looked promising for my project because an older machine will be in use (P3 with only 128 MB RAM). Alpine ran pretty well and I didn’t find it terribly hard to set up–though I am a fairly seasoned Linux user. But in the end I couldn’t make use of Alpine. As you might expect it’s something of a crippled distro: the one application I really needed to run–vlc–was compiled to run without a gui (remote control mode), which was NOT going to work for my project. You see, I have clueless users who need pretty pictures in order to interact to some degree with the computer. And I’m not going to get involved in attempting to compile a complex program like vlc on this hobbled distro–sounds like an exercise in extreme frustration to me. A bit sad I couldn’t use it since it seemed just right for the job in all other respects.

By: anon

anon — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 11:18:43 +0000

Got it down to 25 MB with PekWM and XFCE panel. That’s with several xterms, irssi, ace of penguins, and netsurf.

By: CountDuckula

CountDuckula — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 21:00:32 +0000

Just FYI, I did three distro installs on my dual core desktop last night. These were base installs, no X or any other garbage and following is their memory usage after a reboot,

Alpine Linux: 21MB
Arch Linux: 27MB
Debian: 24MB

So, Alpine is the winner but not by a screaming margin. Was surprised that Arch was the worst performer based on the above readings. On an older machine the results may be different…

By: Three mediocre attempts « Motho ke motho ka botho

Three mediocre attempts « Motho ke motho ka botho — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 14:24:09 +0000

[...] my rush to install Alpine Linux on my Mebius failed catastrophically, with neither the CD booting nor an emulated system written [...]

By: anon

anon — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 10:48:44 +0000

same for debian, only 8 MB at a console without anything else installed.

By: CountDuckula

CountDuckula — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 10:06:04 +0000

Couldn’t get my Intel 830 graphics chipset to fire up X under Alpine Linux no matter what I tried but anyway was still impressed that it only took 8MB of RAM to boot up the console – who needs a GUI

By: CountDuckula

CountDuckula — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 10:01:47 +0000

Gotta try that Debian build – he’s even running Conky too which runs up the memory usage!

By: Armor Nick

Armor Nick — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 17:30:55 +0000

Ah, Xfce. The last (ancient) environment following the traditional desktop paradigms. It’s comforting to know that there’ll always be a old-style desktop left

By: Links 2/12/2010: Red Hat Climbs 6.28%, Linux Mint 10 Receives High Marks | Techrights

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 22:55:31 +0000

[...] Also not a joke: XFCE on 39Mb Not Debian this time — although Debian could probably put up a fight when compared to this. No, this time it’s Alpine Linux, which you may or may not have heard of. Until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t. [...]