footprint..

[atrus123]

My Gentoo footprint in Fluxbox is only 40mb. I love it. And that's with running torsmo, gdeskcal, and an imbedded aterm.

Is there any reason at all to upgrade my laptop to 1gb ram?

J.

[i92guboj]

Well, that is a question with double answer. In absolute terms (and talking about performance) it is obvious that, the more ram, the more speed (to certain limit of course). Mainly, because with 1gb, the use of swap will become very rare. Another thing to consider is that that will also save some hard disk activity, making the life of your hd longer.

On the other side, you need to consider if you are really going to use it.

To clear it up: in my opinion, it does not depend in what WM or DE do you use, but in the thing that you do with them. If you encode video or compile very big things, then your memory will fill up soon, and does not matter wich WM do you use. If you just do light office works or the like, then you can run with your actual memory size.

To give you an idea, I use fvwm, wich loaded can take about 40mb of mem, with just some dropdown terms, a pager, a mixer applet and four pages in a single desktop. In adiction, I sometimes play around with kde-3.4, a customized to the bone kde that takes about 67mb just booted. Even if you use a heavier wm, the difference is not so big (untill you start opening a lot of qt and gtk apps, of course).

Short response: if you can afford it on a comfortable manner then upgrade it.

[atrus123]

Yes, that's true with regards to the swapfile, but as of right now, Gentoo barely touches it. Aside from bootup, the harddrive barely flickers at all.

Maybe if I were going to start running larger programs on this laptop the gig would be worthwhile, but as of now, the largest thing I've got is the Gimp, and even it seems perfectly content with my 512.

I'm just in awe of my Gentoo. It's so small and fast, a far cry from the 128mb base footprint Windows has. I'm sure my using Fluxbox helps too. I have a feeling that Gnome and KDE are quite a bit bulkier.

J.

[Lord Bob]

Right now I have 263MB free on my system. I have 482MB of total RAM. I am quite content with how much memory I have. Keep in mind though, I am currently running a couple Konqueror Windows, Kopete, Amarok, Gkrellm, Kcalc, Konsole, Valknut, MySQL, cups, etc and my system is still crusing along like nothing's happening.

So far, the only time I touch swap is when I'm compiling large packages like KDE.

So, basically like 6thpink said, unless you're going to be doing heavier-duty work, then 512MB should be good for basic web browsing, email, word processing, music listening, 3D game playing (scorched3d is so awesome!) on dual monitors all simultaneously .... in a tricked out KDE setup like me!
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[Sanome]

[i92guboj]

I use to use fvwm. But a CLEAN kde install, takes no more than ~70 mb on just booted. At least in my box.