Lightweight programming distro

ondoho · 03-10-2018, 02:22 AM

@op:
if you really have only 512MB RAM, you should consider NOT using a graphical desktop at all.
or using a very, very minimal GUI (just a windowmanager on top of X), and do your coding in terminal-based apps.
e.g. vim i believe is a very powerful coding editor.
combine that with the compilers and other fetures already present on most linuxes, you have your very light integrated development environment!

Turbocapitalist · 03-10-2018, 03:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ondoho

e.g. vim i believe is a very powerful coding editor.

Both emacs and vim are great. For some reason I use both but for diferent languages. Both have a lot of fancy but useful stuff like syntax highlighting.

In that way 512MB will be ok without the usual, heavy desktop applications and desktop environments.

However, the Rasperry Pi computer was mentioned already up in #5. You can buy a full kit, including shipping, for a rather reasonable price and either use it as a simple desktop or, better, SSH into it and work that way.

zk1234 · 03-28-2018, 03:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by f0b_t3st4

The only requirements are:

It has to have a desktop, doesn't need to look cool, or be HD, it could be just like a Win95 desktop. It would be nice to be able to change the background
It has to have some office tools like a calculator
It has to have some compilers or to be able to download them from the internet.
As little HDD space required as possible. I can make a partition anything smaller than 15G.
x86, my RAM is 512M (remember I'm just practicing), 1.73GHz CPU, so anything that requires less or equal to that.
It can have whatever else, but it's not necesary

4MLinux meets all these requirements (*). You must choose the Legacy Installer from the installation CD menu.

(*) However, besides a wide set of development tools, you will have a modern Desktop with Chromium, VLC, Audacious and the like. If an eye-candy Desktop is not a big problem for you, you can give 4MLinux a try ;-)