What should I put on...

[michaelrmgreen]

... a 166MHz 64Mb portable? (Tosh Libretto 100CT)? Used for intertubes etc. TIA

[TerryP]

NetBSD might be handy.

[BSDfan666]

I would use OpenBSD, but then again, I use it on everything. :)

(This is a general BSD topic, probably doesn't belong in the FreeBSD section..)

[Carpetsmoker]

Either Free-, Net-, or OpenBSD work rather well on older systems, I'm not sure which is the fastest, I don't expect there's a huge difference.

[michaelrmgreen]

Hmmm, Open, Net, Free. Well my experience is exclusively with Free, so I'll try that. Any advice on optimisations or other actions to get the best result, bearing in mind the limited hardware spec (166Mhz, 64Mb)? TIA

[TerryP]

don't use emacs, open office, any mozilla browser, gnome, kde, or xfce unless necessary.


If your going to be running X (probably not good on 64mb ram), you might really want to consider blackbox or twm .

[BSDfan666]

don't use emacs, open office, any mozilla browser, gnome, kde, or xfce unless necessary.


If your going to be running X (probably not good on 64mb ram), you might really want to consider blackbox or twm .twm? are you kidding? :p use fuxbox, blackbox hasn't been touched since 2005.. :(

[michaelrmgreen]

X aside, what other 'weight-loss' action should I take? TA.

[Carpetsmoker]

You may want to disable sendmail if you don't use it, or use a lighter alternative (Like mail/ssmpt)

Add this to /etc/rc.conf
sendmail_enable="no"
sendmail_submit_enable="no"
sendmail_outbound_enable="no"
sendmail_msp_queue_enable="no"

You may also want to disable some ttys in /etc/ttys, every one takes up some amount of memory, the "Pseudo terminals" don't take up memory, and you can leave them there.

You may want to disable some of the periodic scripts in /etc/periodic.conf (See /etc/defaults/periodic.conf for defaults), some can take quite a bit of time to finish, for example this disables some daily sendmail scripts:

daily_clean_hoststat_enable="no"
daily_status_mail_rejects_enable="no"
daily_status_include_submit_mailq="no"
daily_submit_queuerun="no"

[BSDfan666]

Note, Carpetsmoker's advice is for FreeBSD.. I don't recommend you disable sendmail if you're using OpenBSD, it's necessary and doesn't use a lot of resources.

You would do good with swap space on that system, not sure how much space you have.. as you didn't include that in your initial post.

If you don't plan on compiling anything, skip the comp43 package.. though, that's not very fun, games43 is option... etc/base/misc/man are needed!

[IdOp]

I recently adopted a to-be-discarded PC of similar modest proportions: 200MHz pentium with 32MB ram. (Though it's not the issue here, I put Linux on it as that was the most convenient for me.) Things were going pretty good until I fired up Seamonkey. It took 2 minutes to load, worse than my worst fears; even worse than the old days running Mozilla on an i386/25MHz/8MB. So my first comment is be glad of the 64 MB, it could be a lot worse! It would be interesting if you find you can scrape by with a fat browser on 64.

So, I temporarily gave up on the adopted machine, until reading another thread (http://www.daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=895) on this forum about favourite browsers. It prompted me to have another look at links (http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~clock/twibright/links). This seems to be a reasonably workable alternative for my low-ram machine. It's lean and has some graphic capabilities, and does a bang-up job on the frame-buffer console. It may not satisfy all your browsing needs, but could be a piece of the puzzle. My modest BSD experience hasn't gotten into console frame buffers yet, but IIRC NetBSD and FreeBSD support it? If that's wrong hopefully somebody will correct or elaborate on this.

[michaelrmgreen]

Actuallt this site has some useful stuff:
http://www.minibsd.org/

[phoenix]

daily_clean_hoststat_enable="no"
daily_status_mail_rejects_enable="no"
daily_status_include_submit_mailq="no"
daily_submit_queuerun="no"

Note: the above belongs in /etc/periodic.conf, and not /etc/rc.conf.

[fbsduser]

Use any of the keyboard only window managers if you can, or openbox, instead of fluxbox/blackbox. That preserves some RAM.

[BSDfan666]

{flux,black}box are MIT licenced, openbox is GPL.. perhaps not a good reason to avoid it, but a reason none the less.

fluxbox never uses more then 3M of memory here.. ;)

[mdh]

don't use emacs, open office, any mozilla browser, gnome, kde, or xfce unless necessary.


If your going to be running X (probably not good on 64mb ram), you might really want to consider blackbox or twm .

Why, back in my day we ran AfterStep 1.0.0 on FreeBSD with 16 megs of ram and it was downright beautiful.

[TerryP]

If you could fit a firefox instance full of tabs into a FreeBSD+X.Org setup with even 32mb of memory without needing to swap, I'd eat my hat ;=). Manage to fit an emacs grand masters session into 16mb, and I'll call guinness!

I've heard that the FreeBSD kernel needs to see at least 32mb of system memory now're days or it'll throw up it's hands in horror so to speak, but heavy-weights like firefox/openoffice/kde/etc would blow through even that much memory fast, good thing for virtual memory eh? If I had to live with 64mb of RAM, I'd probably replace the X/WM combo with GNU Screen + zsh.