Even at life under 256MB. I was fortunate enough to stumble upon a Radio Shack that was closing up shop. They had PCMCIA Netgear 802.11G NICs for sale.. marked down from their original $69.99 to a cool $15. New in box. I knew I wasn't going to have the integrated NIC hell I always have when trying to install a linux client. From eeePCs to full-sized towers doing what dd-wrt on a good wrt54g should have been doing for me all along... I have experienced WiFi driver hell in all its incarnations. ndiswrapper, revision typos in the source code, madwifi, competing modules in the kernel, you name it. Maybe I've just been a mac user too long and I'm spoiled soft or whatever but I knew this time.. even if I had to use an old PCMCIA based machine.. I was going to get $15 worth of wifi bliss.
What I ended up getting was a whole lot more.
So when confronted with any piece of crap to start with one has to start down the path of software selection. For me it's easy... if it can't run Mac OS X, then it's Ubuntu. If it can't run Ubuntu, then it's Xubuntu. If it can't run Xubuntu, it's probably not worth your time unless you want to run vintage stuff on it. And when I say vintage I mean Commander Keen or Jane of the Jungle. True old schoolers are like "you mean adventure or zork or.." shut up. Commander Keen is old school now, and you are too old school if you think that's new school.
School oldness aside, I went with Xubuntu. That 256MB number had me biting my nails. I have video cards in piles of garbage with more RAM than that. That's HALF the RAM in my cell phone. My cell phone... that makes and receives phone calls and sends messages 160 bytes in length. Has 512MB of ram. Of course it plays super fun awesome games, too.. but still :).
I can't tell you what the install process looked like or how long it took because seriously who watches operating systems install any more? And if you do why do you? It's seriously the nerd equivalent to watching paint drying. Sure it's brought on by Microsoft's infamous 60% across the progress bar timezone question or some radio button where you choose between "Sucky" and "Good" where "Good" is already checked and all you gotta do is hit "OK". Haha.. I really am happy and I have a point about all this.. and it has to do with Pandora and Google Chrome and the future and all that.
So the OS gets installed. WiFi - working out of the box. Just pop in my WPA2 password and I'm on. First thing I do is click on Firefox -- the default browser in Xubuntu 10.04. Holy crap. That made me even more scared of the 256MB because it turned my linux machine into a pagefile maintainer with cursor-moving features. Seriously... I had to wait for init, X11, my audio stack, gconfd, dbus, hald, and most of the running kernel to get swapped out of memory so I could type something into the address bar while it was half way through it's "wicked cool" fade effect.
I wanted to quit. Man being a nerd isn't for me anymore. That's why I have the super nice MacBook Pro .. so I can never have to deal with pieces of crap like this anymore. Ever. Again. But just spent $15 on this WiFi card, and I was going to get my $15 worth.
I went through my junk heap like 500 times last night looking for a laptop that had PC133 SODIMMs... No luck here. Every old laptop had DDR at the very least. some 256MB SODIMMs, some 512's.. but none were PC133. This was obviously not a problem I was going to solve with hardware.
So it came down to this. What does a Mikey G "NEED" out of his computer?
1). Facebook (with Firefox down for the count, I'm kind of screwed here)
2). Zimbra Calendar & Email (mg2's or WSU's it doesn't matter we're all 6.x now)
3). Some kind of music software. Preferably all of the music I own on shuffle. Something a lot like Pandora.
4). A text editor / suite
5). A revision control system
At this point this laptop can do only two of these things semi decently.. and that's because they're the easiest things for a computer to do. Edit text and transfer data. Pandora is a web app, a fat one at that. If web apps were fat kids, I'd be able to call Pandora fat and get away with it. Their "Client" is almost an even worse situation. It's an Adobe Air application which pretty much ensures it's a memory leak with extra functionality. Imagine flash without the browser holding it captive. *shudder*. While my dual core 3ghz MBP w/ 4GB of ram doesn't mind spending 200MB of ram streaming music and album art, my new awesome 1.2ghz celery w/ 256MB of ram can't even think of it. Even after I went and got Google Chrome as the main browser the Pandora site sent its Chrome thread to the 100MB mark in short order. Enter: pianobar. A command line Pandora client.
27047 mikeyg 20 0 90348 3744 2864 S 7.3 1.6 0:32.00 pianobar
That's it, right there.. using 3744 kbytes of resident memory. It goes up and down.. I'm sure most of it is caching. I've never wanted to go into a process table , shove everything else aside, and hug a running process so bad in my life. It's making my world so much better with 4MB of ram.
As for Facebook & Zimbra...
Facebook is a little bit lighter at 31MB of resident memory. But as you can tell from the CPU time I've been using it a while. And it takes Firefox that much memory to load half of about:blank. 14% of my pie goes to Facebook. That sounds about right.
24944 mikeyg 20 0 141m 31m 7956 S 0.0 14.0 1:06.87 chrome
Zimbra.. and let's be fair here. This Zimbra instance is no joke. It gets calendar appointments from Wayne State, HyperHive Inc., all the Praux.com stuff, and mg2.org email. I composed a few messages using this process as well.
24996 mikeyg 20 0 168m 48m 6952 S 0.0 21.2 8:19.00 chrome
48MB. 21.2% of the pie. It didn't seem to be getting too out of control. I fully expect I could get a solid work day out of these two Chrome tabs without having to restart them. They were both very responsive as well.
So to save on having 4 million gnome-terminals open, I opened one full screen one and started a screen session inside it. And created a half dozen screen "windows". This was far less resource intensive. Sure you still have the bash process and the overhead of screen... but you don't have to load all that eye candy over and over again. Screen is using 922 kbytes of memory. And each one of those 7 bash processes are 16k within 1MB. So 8MB. One vim session with all my bells and whistles pushes 8MB, I'm sure this will grow throughout the day.. maybe to 16MB.
But instead of freaking out and buying RAM I did something I haven't done in a while. I made due with what I had. I'm damn proud of this little Xubuntu laptop and I think I'll use it for a while. Though if anyone has some PC133 SODIMMs they want to trade some DDR PC2100 SODIMMs for, hit me up :).
Final Tally!
Facebook: 31M
Zimbra: 48M
Terminals: 8M
Pandora / Music: 4M
Text Editing: 16M
Total: 107M
That leaves me with 100M for all the system essentials and config daemons to be happy... It leaves me a healthy filesystem cache considering how much memory I actually have, and it gives me 50M to browse the web with, use Google Apps (which, by the way, didn't push the Chrome threads above 32M each). With a screen size I can read and a keyboard I can actually type on. I could actually do the majority of my computing on this machine without too much issue. If anyone wants to dare me to do it with a financial incentive at the end to encourage my strict participation, please let me know ;)