Which graphical OS needs the fewest RAM

[Beni]

Hi volks

I often try new Operating systems, I'm trying to learn everything, at see the basics. So, right now I'm doing it all with multi-boot. Now, I'm currently thinking about the possibilities of VWWare. I'm thinkin about having one basic system, which don't need much RAM, and then starting the other Operating Systems thrue VMWare.

Now, the question: Which OS would be the best? I'm currently thinking about BeOS, or OS/2. What do you think?

 

[Nodsu]

"best" meaning what?

You might as well run DOS 6.22 with Windows 1.0. That setup would be satisfied with a 286 and 640KB of RAM..

 

[Beni]

Oky; Best = A stable OS, with a good and stable office, and the possibility to run vmware on it

 

[Nodsu]

VMWare for mortals supports only Windows and Linux so you choices of a host operating system are quite limited.

On Windows front your only choice is Windows NT4. Office 97 does everything a normal person needs.

Any Linux supported by VMWare should do as long as you strip it down a bit and use some lightweight desktop environment. OpenOffice may be a bit too heavy for a slow machine so you may have to use AbiWord and Gnumeric.

 

[Beni]

Hmm.. Ok, it doesn't have to be vmware. Something similar is good enough. I saw once a system with BeOS running like this, seemed to work perfectly. But, I'll think about it. I belive, with a good linux, this could work as well.

 

[MYOB]

I've run BeOS in 16MB, and run it very well (with Mozilla, etc) in 64MB.

That said, BeOS gets faster and faster the more RAM you have. But it can handle 32MB.

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

I'm thinkin about having one basic system, which don't need much RAM, and then starting the other Operating Systems thrue VMWare.

Did I understand this correctly? You want to use VMware in a computer that doesn't have much memory? VMware needs quite a lot of memory, if you're going to run it in a system with 32 MB of memory, you won't have enough left (if anything at all) for VMware.

 

[Beni]

no, the computer itself has 768MB Ram. But I have to try a lot of things out (settings on windows, linux). So I want to use a stable "normal" OS, and do the rest on a virtual computer. I know, I could install all the OS directly, but, I think it would be better with a virtual machine. Also the portability, for example from vmware, is more confortable then multi boot.

So, it would be the best, to have a basic OS which doesn't need to much ram.

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

If you decide to install a Linux distribution, read Small Window Managers : for those who do not run NASA machines.

 

[zephead]

i am currently tooling around with red hat linux (ver 7) on a pentium MMX-233 on an old at board with about 81 megs of edo ram. the aged system handles it well even in gui mode. i use kde and the command line mostly, and do compressions and encoding of files on said system. just don't overlook linux's nice networking features.
also noteworthy: i overclocked the system bus to 75 Mhz, cpu runs at about 265 MHz.

 

[Blakhart]

Ever try Qnx?

 

[Nodsu]

QNX will not run VMWare.

And the hardware support is poor..

 

[Phantasm66]

You can't possibily say alternative OS without saying Linux.

 

[eilathean]

Why don't you use VMware ESX instead?

Therefore your system will be totally virtualized. Besides ESX is greatly more powerful than Destop or GSX.

 

[Charles Hammond]

We have an IBM X-Server (Dual PIII) that Has SUSE Linux on it and we run an emulator on that for our IBM Mainframe Software. Runs just like a mainframe.