crazy but stable. haiku work with 256M
memory 256M
CPU single atom 1.92Ghz
disk 5Gb
it can work!
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Oh, wow. Thatās half the RAM my netbook has, and well below minimum requirements even for the 32-bit edition. Haiku amazes again!
Waddlesplash did several optimizations, but no one has yet re-tested how low we can set the requirement and still have Haiku booting. We should do that some time before the beta 6 release, I guess.
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I thought @jscipione did and lowered the requirements?
I am suprised they are not lowered.
It looks like the wiki page with the release notes: R1/Beta5/ReleaseNotes ā Haiku
was not used to write the release notes: R1/beta5 ā Release Notes | Haiku Project
I love to see this happen in a world where even Linux is increasingly bloated. Only NetBSD still cares about performance the way Haiku does.
Thatās not much performance reallyā¦ Haiku is incredibly un-performant compared to linux. We care about other stuff first, like responsiveness in the UI.
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I updated the release notes on the beta5 wiki page from the information in the monthly status reports to try and summarize the changes since beta4 leading up to release. While doing this, I lowered the minimum requirements to 256MB since I have observed Haiku booting with 256MB. It does seem to be a fairly recent change because Haiku would NOT boot with 256MB previously, in B4 and even after. I know this primarily because VMWare creates new VMs of the Other type configured with 256MB by default and then tries to boot them right away. It used to hang on the memory icon never getting to the Desktop, but something got updated to make it boot all the way to the Desktop.
Waddlesplash did his own thing for the release notes and that detail got missed. Weāll keep it our little secret that 256MB boots, although the secret is apparently out!
it should be 1G Disk , 256M Memory , single atom 1.92Ghz cpu.
*haiku work well.
even better than Q4OS-tde with the the same qemu-computer which system special focus at old time.
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We Linux users begged for decades to have an OS that prioritizes, you know, user interface responsiveness. I donāt care if Linux can eke out more performance out of an i9 with 64GB of RAM. Iāll be an old man before any computer I own will be that powerful. I can think of maybe two Linux distributions that still run at all on the kind of machine where Haiku feels right at home. So thank you for caring and doing the right thing.
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And I thought my Haiku 32-bit machine (with 2-threaded 1.6 Ghz Atom CPU and 1 Gb of RAM) is impressiveā¦ Now I see Haiku even works with 4 times less memory. 
AntiX, Slackware and Void GNU/Linux (in that order) can actually run well on old machines with 1 Gb of RAM or even less, but I never dared trying with less than 512 Mb. Besides, 256 Mb is barely higher than what a Spartan graphical setup needs (OpenBox window manager, without any bells and whistles running in the background). Even such a poor manās ādesktopā will take over ~200 Mb just to start. There are other ānicheā distributions specifically designed for low-end old computers, but all of them have restrictions, and you will need to sacrifice functionality.
There are other problems with GNU/Linux on old machines - and Iām not talking about the fact many distributions dropped 32-bit support. glibc (which is what is used in most distributions) is incompatible with some of those oldies, starting from glibc 2.36. And even if your machine is compatible, elogind (which is widely adopted nowadays, even on distributions that donāt use systemd) is causing a variety of problems. The most pronounced of those is the system goes on hibernate mode every few seconds by itself.
There are workarounds for those issues, but I would say Haiku is a much better solution. And considering FreeBSD announced the end of 32-bit support in the next major release, if you want to keep an old machine alive, there arenāt much other choices left.
letās rock and roll.
CPU signal ATOM 1.92hz
memory ļ¼128+64+32+16+8ļ¼=248M
disk ļ¼1024*8/10ļ¼=819.2M
and, haiku run!!!
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AntiX 23 running in 32 bits uses 70MB of RAM on a fresh start, so a VM with 512MB is plentiful. Void might still boot, but the installer runs out of RAM, so no, not anymore. Alpine probably works, and from the other camp thereās always NetBSD. Havenāt tried any of these on bare metal though.
So yes, props for Haiku, which just received a lot more features yet its hardware requirements got cut in half. Funny how that works.
OK, it seems, only puppy , tinycore and haiku can work with 256M Memory.
puppy , it can not run any application with the hard situation.
haiku can run 3 or 4 applications.
tinycore can run more applications.
haiku is good enough for hard situation.
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When running with less than 1GB of RAM, itās probably best to use the 32-bit build of Haiku, as the savings you get from the system using 32-bit pointers instead of 64-bit pointers (among other things) can wind up being significant.
Anyway, Iāve pushed some more memory usage optimizations for packagefs and a pretty major memory leak fix for the BIOS bootloader (and a smaller one for the EFI loader), so it would be interesting to see this retested. Iād imagine that the system can now boot once more with 128MB (or at least the 32-bit version should come close, as long as you donāt have too many packages installed.)
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