[Xastir] Xastir on rugged/small devices- Nokia N800

[Curt, WE7U]

On Tue, 26 Jun 2007, J. Lance Cotton wrote:

> I have a Zaurus, too. There is an alternate ROM system for it (openzaurus)
> which comes in two flavors: Qt-based and X11-based. I've only tried the
> X11-based one superficially, not with xastir.
>
> Not sure if it's even worth it -- the model I have has 64M of RAM, and it's
> split between ramdisk and working-memory. Various builds of the firmware can
> change the ratio between working memory and storage, but I don't know how
> well Xastir would work in such a small memory space.

You're talking to the low-memory king here, in more ways than one!

I started with Linux on a 386SX-20 with 2MB of ram.  I had to do
some serious shenanigans with one of the distributions, Slackware I
think, when they started requiring 4MB of RAM to do the initial
install.  I managed to do it with 2.

As far as X-Windows, I've successfully run it with 16MB.  I have
some PP200 laptops that have 32MB and can run Xastir nicely.  The
trick is to go through your list of running daemons and axe those
that are not really needed.  Also in /etc/inittab you can reduce the
number of virtual consoles down to 2 or one which also helps.  Also
run Rxvt instead of Xterm.  Lot's of little tricks like that.
Anyway, it _can_ be done.

--
Curt, WE7U.   APRS Client Comparisons: http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
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