Introduction

For di­verse rea­sons I won't both­er ex­plain­ing, in­clud­ing stub­bor­ness wor­thy of a vasque mule, I faced the com­plete­ly un­nece­sary task of turn­ing a P75 with 800MB of disk space and 16MB of RAM in­to a mod­ern work­sta­tion ca­pa­ble of per­form­ing the usu­al tasks:

• Graph­i­cal web nav­i­ga­tion.
• E-­mail
• MP3 au­dio
• GNUTel­la
• MPEG video re­pro­duc­tion (yes, re­al­ly ;-)

Plus what­ev­er crossed my mind while us­ing it. Of course I can't ask this tired piece of sil­i­con to be fast, but I won't set­tle for in­ad­e­quate per­for­mance. I am too poor to have a toy com­put­er, I want it to be use­ful, and do re­al work.

The Distribution

Be­cause of di­verse in­stal­la­tion is­sues (this is a note­book with a flop­py disk WITH­OUT lin­ux driver­s, and no op­ti­cal drive), I on­ly man­aged to in­stall De­bian. Since I like ap­t-get, I de­cid­ed to ig­nore oth­er prob­lems (not even a net­work con­fig tool????), and stick with it. I am us­ing test­ing, which is more up­to­date than sta­ble, but not as bro­ken as un­sta­ble.

I could prob­a­bly use much less mem­o­ry and disk us­ing an old dis­tri­bu­tion, like Slack­ware 96. Af­ter al­l, I used that on 16MB 486s, and I re­mem­ber it work­ing ok.

But... the brows­er would be Net­scape 2.0, and there were no mp3 play­er­s, so, fugged­haboutit.

Conclusion: Debian/Testing

Hardware Optimization

Ex­treme­ly im­por­tan­t: hd­parm. This tool con­fig­ures sev­er­al things about the hard disk (D­MA us­age, 32 bit trans­fer­ences, etc.) Since this is a se­nior com­put­er, most op­tions are not sup­port­ed, but with a lit­tle ef­fort I man­aged to in­crease the trans­fer speed from 1.7MBps to 4.7MBp­s, more or less what a semi-­mod­ern desk­top does with­out op­ti­miz­ing.

System startup

Ob­vi­ous­ly, if we are mem­o­ry starved, we should not waste it run­ning un­need­ed stuff. I ap­plied this rule with tal­iban-­wor­thy zeal.

Clean up /etc/inittab.

Why 6 vir­tu­al con­soles? Cut it to 2.

Graph­i­cal login? I am the on­ly user! Adding this line pro­vides a X ses­sion for us­er ralsi­na:

 
        sx:2:res­pawn:/bin/­su - ralsi­na -c ex­ec xinit >/de­v/null 2>&1
         

The use of ex­ec pre­vents the shell from run­ning af­ter X start­s, and use of xinit saves a process (s­tartx calls xinit any­way)

Services

On­ly klogd and ap­md are run­ning by de­fault.

Kernel

Ker­nel 2.2.20, hand built, stat­ic sup­port for all de­vices, no fire­wal­l, no PCI, no noth­ing, low la­ten­cy patched.

X Window System

XFree86 v3.3 us­es less mem­o­ry. But it did­n't work. So, I am us­ing 4.1.

To save mem­o­ry, you can re­move di­verse mod­ules. I avoid­ed xf­s, and made X it­self load the fonts.

Al­so, drop sup­port for Speedo and Type1 fonts, leav­ing on­ly TTF sup­port (I am us­ing the MS core fonts).Those two changes save about 2MB of RAM.

You can al­so re­move ex­ten­sions like XREN­DER, XVideo, etc. but that would in­vove re­com­pil­ing X. There is a tempt­ing op­tion called XTiny, used on PDAs and such, and maybe I will try that some­day.

I con­fig­ured the X serv­er for a 16bpp col­or depth. That saves mem­o­ry when cre­at­ing off­screen pixmap­s, since those are al­ways the depth of the screen. This saves much mem­o­ry when open­ing a web page, for ex­am­ple. It would be bet­ter to use 8bp­p, if on­ly it would­n't look so aw­ful.

You can al­so save disk space re­mov­ing pieces of X, such as xieper­f.

Window Manager

For­get KDE. For­get GNOME. For­get even Win­dow Mak­er. Think smal­l.

Some win­dow man­agers are smal­l, but they achieve their size by shift­ing func­tion­al­i­ty in­to helper app­s. I was look­ing for a WM that was smal­l, but al­lowed me to as­sign short­cut­s, had a menu to launch app­s, and some sort of taskbar. The sup­port for di­verse ap­plets would be a plus.

The an­swer: fluxbox. Us­es less than 500KB of RSS while do­ing all the above.

Applications

Shell

The shell is ac­tu­al­ly a rather large ap­p. bash us­es al­most 2MB of RAM!. So, I made ash the de­fault shel­l, which is 75% small­er.

Ob­vi­ous­ly ash is not a very nice in­ter­ac­tive shel­l, but if you make /bin/sh a sym­link to /bin/ash, the start­up scripts use it, and they be­come much faster.

No­tice that when you start an ap­pli­ca­tion from fluxbox, it starts a shel­l, the shell in turn, starts the ap­p. That shell stays idly in mem­o­ry for the life of the ap­pli­ca­tion!

To save that mem­o­ry, I made ash the us­er shel­l, and made the ter­mi­nal start bash ex­plicite­ly.

You can al­so save that mem­o­ry by con­fig­ur­ing the WM to start "ex­ec rxvt" in­stead of "rxvt", mak­ing rxvt re­place the shell in mem­o­ry, but that does­n't avoid the slow­er start­up time of bash.

In short, us­ing ash saves a lit­tle RAM, but it al­so makes the com­put­er feel a lot faster!

Terminal emulators

Load­ed each one, mea­sured each one, rxvt is by far the small­est.

MP3 player

mp3blaster. Smal­l, pow­er­ful, and us­ing the -2 and -8 op­tion­s, it us­es lit­tle CPU. No oth­er app could play with­out skip­ping.

MPEG Video Player

On­ly one works in this box: MPegTV. Share­ware, and the pret­ty ver­sion (mtv) us­es too much mem­o­ry. But thr CLI ver­sion, mtvp gives me 320x240 at 12f­p­s! As long as it is with­out sound, else it be­comes jerky.

Gnutella client

I tried one, it worked, I liked, it stays: mutel­la

Web browser

No con­test: Graph­i­cal Links un­der X. Fast, sup­ports many pages, a re­al gem. A pre­vi­ous ver­sion said "No con­test: Op­er­a". Well, that was then, this is now ;-)

Con­clu­sion: fluxbox, links, mutel­la, rxvt, MPegTV, ash.

Final Results

I will let my sys­tem do the talk­ing. Here is a reg­u­lar ses­sion, nav­i­gat­ing the we­b, down­load­ing with mutel­la, con­nect­ed to a serv­er via ssh, all with­in X ex­cept for a text ed­i­tor. No­tice how her I am us­ing Oper­a. That is be­cause it is old. Cur­rent­ly I use a cou­ple less MB.

USER	PID	%CPU	%MEM	VSZ	RSS	TTY	STAT	START	TIME	COMMAND
root	1	0.0	0.8	1304	124	?	S	10:06	0:04	init
root	2	0.0	0.0	0	0	?	SW	10:06	0:01	[kflushd]
root	3	0.0	0.0	0	0	?	SW	10:06	0:02	[kupdate]
root	4	0.2	0.0	0	0	?	SW	10:06	0:37	[kswapd]
root	5	0.0	0.0	0	0	?	SW	10:06	0:00	[keventd]
root	133	0.0	0.0	1632	0	?	SW	10:06	0:01	[klogd]
root	136	0.0	0.0	1292	0	?	SW	10:06	0:03	[apmd]
root	181	0.0	0.0	1420	0	?	SW	10:06	0:00	[cardmgr]
root	190	0.0	0.7	1684	112	?	S	10:06	0:00	/usr/sbin/cron
root	425	0.0	0.0	2748	0	?	SW	10:24	0:09	[sshd]
ralsina	611	0.0	0.0	1368	0	tty1	SW	10:47	0:01	[ash]
ralsina	827	0.0	0.0	2220	0	?	SW	11:09	0:00	[xinit]
root	829	2.6	12.1	17556	1780	?	S<	11:09	6:29	X :0
ralsina	832	0.3	2.2	3416	324	?	S	11:09	0:47	/usr/bin/fluxbox
ralsina	834	0.0	1.6	2512	236	?	S	11:09	0:01	wmtuxtime
root	1235	0.0	0.0	1476	0	?	SW	11:50	0:00	[pump]
ralsina	1236	0.0	1.0	2560	148	?	S	11:50	0:09	rxvt -e ash
ralsina	1241	0.0	0.0	1352	0	pts/0	SW	11:50	0:00	[ash]
ralsina	1242	0.0	1.2	2940	180	pts/0	S	11:50	0:11	ssh master.kde.org
ralsina	1413	0.0	0.0	2576	0	?	SW	12:53	0:04	[rxvt]
ralsina	1414	0.0	0.0	1352	0	pts/2	SW	12:53	0:00	[ash]
ralsina	1415	0.0	19.3	16124	2844	pts/2	S	12:53	0:00	mutella
ralsina	1416	0.0	19.3	16124	2844	pts/2	S	12:53	0:00	mutella
ralsina	1417	0.0	19.3	16124	2844	pts/2	S	12:53	0:04	mutella
ralsina	1418	0.0	19.3	16124	2844	pts/2	S	12:53	0:04	mutella
ralsina	1419	4.7	19.3	16124	2844	pts/2	S	12:53	6:26	mutella
ralsina	1420	0.3	19.3	16124	2844	pts/2	S	12:56	0:26	mutella
ralsina	1500	0.0	0.0	1352	0	?	SW	13:21	0:00	[sh]
ralsina	1501	3.2	16.0	16420	2364	?	S	13:21	3:31	/usr/X11R6/bin/opera
ralsina	1503	0.0	16.0	16420	2364	?	S	13:22	0:00	/usr/X11R6/bin/opera
ralsina	1721	0.0	0.0	1352	0	tty1	SW	14:22	0:00	[sfte]
ralsina	1733	1.0	4.1	2816	612	tty1	S	14:22	0:30	/tmp/sfte linux16.txt
ralsina	1742	3.1	3.0	1364	452	tty2	S	15:10	0:00	-ash
ralsina	1744	0.0	7.5	2968	1108	tty2	R	15:10	0:00	ps aux

	total	used	free	shared	buffers	cached
Mem:	14708	14144	564	4644	816	5304
-/+ buffers/cache:		8024	6684
Swap:	47992	18880	29112

I HAVE FREE MEMORY ;-)

If you have tips to share, or want to know de­tails on any­thing men­tioned on this ar­ti­cle, just post a com­men­t, or email me us­ing the link in this very page.