Well, 1993 or 94, I had Linux, X11, fvwm(2?) and emacs running in 5MB. To be fair it was not very fast, and one later and extremely expensive £600 upgrade to 16MB made it perform much better.
Wow, an Atom N270? I'm envious, I've always wanted to find a fun way to make use of old hardware like that. I have a Google Cr-48 chromebook with a similar CPU and 2GB of RAM. I'd be interested in learning more about your setup to see if I could get something similar going.
I have an EEE 1005HA laptop with N270, 2 GB RAM and an old SSD. I'm running the latest Debian (it is the last version to support x86-32) with Xfce and I'm using it to read books in fbreader and Okular, play podcasts and SD videos with MPV, read IRC (via SSH). Actually it is completely useful except web browsers -- even simple pages which have not changed much since the laptop was new (such as this site or Wikipedie) are pretty slow in modern Chromium/Firefox; "modern" webpages are almost unusable. You can use links2 -g (in graphics mode) or Dillo, they are fast, but the usability is lacking.
- Install ZRAM, set 1/4 of your RAM as compressed ZRAM
- Use Luakit, set hardware-acceleration-policy to either always or never, just try.
- Setting an Android 4.x User Agent in Luakit will help, too. Often pages sent for phones/tablets are much lighter.
- git clone https://github.com.com/stevenblack/hosts ; cd hosts ; sed -n '/Start Steven/,$p' < hosts > hosts.new, append that hosts.new file to your current /etc/hosts file.
- MuPDF it's far lighter than Okular.
- Fluxbox + Rox + Zukitre GTK2/3 and Fluxbox theme can be far lighter than the whole DE. Ping me back for an easy setup.
In like 1997 I accidentally removed the wrong memory stick and booted up my 486dx2 with only 4MB of RAM. I heard the hard drive seek more or less constantly. But X started and some xterms. Never tried to use it, just wanted to shut it down cleanly. This was a FreeBSD 2.x system IIRC.
