Live CD RAM requirements

[dciarnie]

According to the F10 release notes, 192MiB are required with 256 MiB recommended for a GUI. Is this realistic for a live CD? For that matter, is this realistic for an installed system?

I am trying to boot the live KDE CD on a machine with only 256 MiB of RAM but the startup process gets just past the KDE splash screen. It does not get to the login screen. All that I get, ironically enough, is a blue screen and a sluggish mouse cursor. I can switch to a text mode VT but the system is so busy that logins timeout. I can start the system in text mode but starting X is still not possible.

I assume that the problem is that 256 MiB is simply not enough RAM to run X from a live CD and that it would run fine if I install to the hard drive but I'm not 100% certain. Does anyone have any thoughts on whether it's worth installing Fedora on a 1GHz Celeron with 256 MiB of RAM (as compared to the horrendously sluggish Windows XP that is currently installed on the system)?

Thanks,
Dan.

[Hlingler]

Originally Posted by dciarnie

According to the F10 release notes, 192MiB are required with 256 MiB recommended for a GUI.

That is for an installed OS.

Originally Posted by dciarnie

Is this realistic for a live CD?

No. A live CD/DVD is running solely in RAM, and so needs more for realistic, practical functioning.

Originally Posted by dciarnie

For that matter, is this realistic for an installed system?

Yes, quite so: XFCE4-Live installed here on 466 MHz CPU with 256 MB RAM, looks good (including 3D/DRI graphical acceleration and desktop effects).

Originally Posted by dciarnie

I am trying to boot the live KDE CD on a machine with only 256 MiB of RAM but the startup process gets just past the KDE splash screen. It does not get to the login screen. All that I get, ironically enough, is a blue screen and a sluggish mouse cursor. I can switch to a text mode VT but the system is so busy that logins timeout. I can start the system in text mode but starting X is still not possible.

I assume that the problem is that 256 MiB is simply not enough RAM to run X from a live CD and that it would run fine if I install to the hard drive but I'm not 100% certain. Does anyone have any thoughts on whether it's worth installing Fedora on a 1GHz Celeron with 256 MiB of RAM (as compared to the horrendously sluggish Windows XP that is currently installed on the system)?

Not surprising, as KDE4 is fairly resource-heavy graphics-wise, and will try to enable lots of I-Kandi. Try the XFCE4-live spin (installed, not running live). It will be fine.

V

[Deonis]

it's enough but for KDE in swap free mode you need at least 540 mb, I thing ! try Gnome instead (it uses around 400mb of ram without swap). At the same time it also depends from what you start your system, is it CD ? or it's a flash card ?

[dciarnie]

In this case, CD. The computer won't boot from a flash card even though it claims that it should be able to.

Thanks to both of you for the info,
Dan.