What is with every distro of linux and their inability to post minimum system requirements for current versions? Just put it on the download page! how hard is that? I am trying to just run samba on linux on an otherwise decent machine except that it only has 128mb RAM in an outdated memory module format (I have found just about every dimm simm pc100 pc133 pc3000 PO'd9000 etc architecture except what I need) with limited memory slots but has 3x 200gb HD's I would like to use on the network. I have tried a few current versions of different distro's and a few older versions i found with different packages and they all crash on reboot and all the support forums then answer me with "why are you running it on that low of memory?" and "you have to have at least 256 or 512". Well damn if you didn't want me to try it on 128mb then you should have put the minimum required. I already am running mint on 2 laptops and plan to use ubuntu on another and wipe a desktop and use one of the two on it as well, but having the 600GB on this machine as NAS would be helpful on these and other projects so I tackled it first and have been almost put off by the not-so-upfront handling.

SO in short if anyone has a nice idea of a file server OS that maybe prides itself on being able to run on unused older machines to give them new life, I would be glad to hear it.

Hi FoZFoRiC.
Acouple of days ago I installed AntiX in an old computer and it seems to be working fine. I think the requirements for AntiX are 128 MB of RAM.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/antix-linux/
I heard Bodhi Linux is a good one too
http://www.bodhilinux.com/system.php
You can also check on SliTaz
http://www.slitaz.org/en/get/

Good luck to you

If you want to run just a Samba server you have no need for a GUI. I run a Debian 6 server headless without a GUI and manage it via SSH. With SSH, Samba, FTP, Apache and a rsync server it currently is running using only 92 MB of RAM, so 128MB should be more than enough just for Samba.
Any OS that can be installed without GUI should run with your hardware.

In addition you could have a look at this query's results.

You might want to try Vector Linux. If you can get it to install with that much ram it will run as well or better than anything else. Vector Light gives you a choice of a few light weight window managers and fits on a regular cd. IIRC i have installed it on a machine with that much ram. I would choose the text install method if you want to try it.

As mentioned, you should go for a command line only approach. Most distro's would fit the bill for that but my list would be,

Arch
Alpine Linux
Debian
Slackware
FreeBSD

I sometimes (OK, rarely) wonder why people try to pass off their lack of research as a problem caused by somebody or something else. After all it's not like hardware requirements are impossible to find and it's not like operating systems don't accommodate potential users with documentation (ah, the dreaded D word).
LMGTFY (but just for once):
Fedora lists the recommended requirements on the front page with a link to the full text (text mode: P4, 768 MiB),
Centos 5: P3, 256 MB minimum,
Slackware: 486 processor, 64MB RAM,
Debian: i486 processor and at least 56MB of memory, and if you're feeling adventurous:
NetBSD/i386: a full installation requires at least 8M of RAM.

2 members found this post helpful.

I realise that not everybody can afford new hardware, but if you are thinking of running an old PC as a server and leaving it on all the time you may want to look into how much electricity it is using when you do that. It's not unheard of for an old PC to use twice as much power as a cheap NAS device, for example.

1 members found this post helpful.

Isn't that a lot? It remind me of the first computer I used circa 1978. It had a 8080 and 64 K of RAM (yes, 65536 bytes).

Wow, that was well speced compared to my Acorn Atom, that I self assembled from a kit of parts, 6052 CPU and 2K RAM!

I really miss that machine and would dearly love to get hold of one again. Acorn are sadly no more but at least they left us a legacy in the form of the ARM processor.

Most distros will typically sit there between 20-30MB RAM used just after boot with no GUI - it will be probably be towards the lower end on an older P3 or P4.

It has been said that original IBM-PC designers made the statement that no one would ever use more than 1M of ram.

Not sure how true that is but I have heard it forever.

"DOS addresses only 1 Megabyte of RAM because we cannot imagine any applications needing more."

Mostly attributed to microsoft. Finding a source for a 30+ yea old (possible) quote on the net isnt much fun.

Quite a few distros dont post minimum system requriements (various reasons) but most, if not all the major distros do.

Just use a search engine to find out what you want to know. How hard is that?

how hard is that?????????????? EXTREMELY HARD
dont give me this "do a search" BS ... I follow the RTFM standard and if the people who are offering software and then saying "go to the forums" in place of writing a proper and informative manual then exactly where is anybody supposed to find the info they need???

DO YOU WORK FOR GOOGLE? is that it? because searches only give you advertisements and the NSA information on what you are searching for. I do my homework, just because companies are complete profiteering putz's that hide everything doesn't mean I haven't looked for hours for the info I need.

Your problem here is that a real fileserver requires a lot of ram. Anything using ZFS will require at least 8gb. If you are going to use AD to auth then you will need at least 2G for its winbind cache.

Not sure 128m is going to help with this task.