Quote Originally Posted by Mustang64
It’s amazing just how small Knoppix, or any Linux based system, can get and still work! I have a copy of Peanut that I use on a 386 25MHz computer and two 100 M drives. Also with less than 200 M RAM.

Windoze won’t even load, let alone work, unless you go back to version 3.xx (aw-yes those were the days when software developers were still working on efficient, compact programs without all the fluff, and dead-end code)…

GMD
I have to differ with you there. I still have Win98 on a P166 with 64 megs of memory, it runs windows fine, but Knoppix (with GUI) crawls on it. I still get occasional use from the machine; it makes a fine FTP server running Windows. I also use it to test install some software, and as a system where I can run any self-extracting EXE file I happen to download (no way I'm going to trust such files on my main desktop).

By the way, I couldn't even get any regular distro like Debian to install on this system. They looked at the memory and just refused. But 98 (and of course 95 and Win 3.1) run fine on it, and I expect I could load OS2 or a few others systems as well.

I also have a hand me down I took from someone just to save it from the trash. It's a 100 mhz K5, with either 32 or 48 megs of memory (yea, I forget which). It's certainly not a great system, but it's good for running packet sniffers and the like under Windows. I can browse the net with it (not snappy, but functional). I have tried to boot Knoppix and a few other of the live CD's on it. But these may take 30 minutes or more just to boot, and are really not useable once you have them booted.

So Linux certainly suffers from bloat as much as any OS does. It's woth noting that, strictly based on hardware power, either of the above 2 computers is by far much more computer than the CDC system that was a time sharing system for the entire student body at my University (back in the dark ages). Bloat like this is an unfortunate industry trend that is affecting almost all of the industry, including open source.