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Upgrade now, or wait?

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dishawjp:
Hi All,

With all the help I've gotten from this list, I've learned to do quite a bit with Red Hat 6.2, but have been unable to install many downloaded programs due to out of date library files and some dependancy errors and such.  Since this is my first attempt at Linux (it's been about 3 weeks now and I've only used Windows once at home in that time) the hardware is old.  I've got RH 6.2 on a P166 w/48 MB of RAM and a 2 GB hard drive.  I expect to be able to order a new computer from CarbonLinux.com in a few months, but have to live with this hardware until then.

I got the disks for RH 7.2 and would like to know if it's reasonable to upgrade this old hardware to RH 7.2.  Currently only 44% of my hard drive space is used, but even when not working it too hard about 95% of my RAM and about 15% of my swap is in use.  

Any thoughts... other than a new computer now?  With two kids in college, that just isn't a possibility right now.

Jim

Calum:
remember one thing - windows users think that using all your RAM is a bad thing, that's because windows fills up your RAM with shit, then uses your swap file instead, which, by default, can be as large as the entire free space on your hard drive. That's why it makes sense to limit your swap file size to about 1.5 times your RAM size in windows, to force it to flush the RAM regularly.

Linux, as you might expect uses its RAM. after all, what's the point in having all that RAM if you expect it to be empty all the time? the reason your RAM is always full is that it is doing its job. The fact that your swap partition (which by definition is set to a particular size, how sensible et c) is not full up shows how effectively your RAM is being used.

In my opinion, but remember this is mostly hearsay, you should have NO problems putting red hat 7.x on that machine, especially if all your hardware et c works in red hat 6.x. The only thing i might flag up is the size of your hard drive. a graphical install of linux with all the apps and so on that i want typically takes up 4Gb on my drive, you will have to shore down the software you want to install. Choose to only install one desktop environment, and so on (i recommend XFce  ;)  ) however again, if you managed to shave 6.2 down to size, it will likely not be too much trouble to do the same thing to 7.x.

Good luck, hope you like it, let us know how you get on!  :D

Master of Reality:
RedHat 7.2 needs 64MB of RAM to run X.

Calum:
oh yeah. never noticed that, well if you're not going to install any graphical stuff then you'll easily fit it all on your hard drive! why does it need that much? is there no way to get a graphical display with less RAM than that?

Master of Reality:
not with red hat (not any way that i know of)

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