Replies

How much memory does one get on a cellphone? Linux of late, which had once had an economy like that of the old Sun workstations (40 whole megabytes of memory? wow! I can put everything on this screen!) has now gone the way of the gigabyte bloatware of Gates. Don’t even think of trying to kick off this year’s Ubuntu distros on a 10 year old computer.

You're looking at it from a general OS point of view. I'm sure on a mobile platform, the kernel is stripped of everything but what the hardware requires.

While the average user won't be pruning his kernel to reduce its memory footprint, the modular nature and kernel tools makes it possible. I'm sure a Multi-Billion dollar cell phone company can spare the resources to taylor it to their needs.

Which is of course, the point of the OS (and OSS) to begin with.

Don’t even think of trying to kick off this year’s Ubuntu distros on a 10 year old computer.

Don’t confuse a Linux distribution with the Linux core. Some Linux distros tend to throw everything (from open office to lush graphics environments) into their install. The core that you actually need to run Linux is very small. That’s why it is becomming the OS of choice for embedded software (from DVD players to handheld GPS systems, heck my TV is even running Linux.)

Don’t even think of trying to kick off this year’s Ubuntu distros on a 10 year old computer.

Ubunto, no. Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, Freeduc, Knoscience, and Kioskcd (to name but five distros), yes. Not all flavors of Linux require large amounts of memory or terabyte-speed processors to run. Some live-CD distros can even boot your machine and allow you to rescue critical files after winDoze crashes and renders your machine inoperable. There is even one specifically tailored to rescue your system, as well as repartition your hard drive and make images of the partitions for future rescues. Makes recovery a lot less painful if something corrupts your system. :)

>> How much memory does one get on a cellphone?

The G1 that I have, the first Android phone, only has about 90MB of internal memory, but it has a micro SD slot. It comes with a 1 gig card, but I have an 8 gig SD card, and I don’t know — perhaps you can put a 16 gig card in it, I don’t know. The applications run from the internal memory, and some people run out of memory, but you have to have maybe 150 applications loaded up, give or take (depends on the size of the applications) to max it out. If your phone is rooted, as mine and many many G1 owners phones are, you can partition the SD card and run the apps from the SD card, and therefore load as many apps as you like on it.

The Android phones coming out now have more memory. The HTC Magic, already out it Europe, and out here soon (prolly different name here), has 192MB RAM and 512MB ROM, and again, has an SD card, so you can load tons of music, photos, etc. on it.

The Samsung i7500, coming out sometime this year, has 8GB of storage, 128MB of RAM, and a microSD card, up to 16GB the specs say.