Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

On Thu, 1 Jul 2004 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> Sindi Keesan wrote:
> >
> > How much RAM does the kernel take up?
> 
> Approximately 2mb.
> 
> > The Xvesa route is clearly not going to work in 3M RAM, 
> 
> Nor will seejpeg.
> 
> > I add things up to 2516 (2.5K) plus whatever RAM the 
> > kernel uses, 
> 
> That comes to more than 4mb.
> 
> > So in theory it should be possible to go online and browse 
> > and display one 640x480 image at a time with BL3 and links.  
> 
> Your theory ignores the RAM occupied by the kernel (which is
> not swapable).  

Right, I forgot that the kernel (under 500K, probably compressed) occupies
more than 500K RAM.  I doubt I can even use links without graphics in 3MB
RAM.  I guess that is a DOS computer.  But in the process I learned that
you can run seejpeg in greyscale.  I could not find a way to do this with
xli or zgv (not that I understood the entire help file) - is there?  
Links2 -g (svgalib) needed at least 16 color to run.

Greyscale uses less RAM than 24-bit 'color' on a mono monitor, which many
older laptops have (including some 486s).  I think it ought to be possible
to use BL3 with greyscale seejpeg in a bit more RAM - maybe 4MB with swap
partition, which I don't think would be enough for Xvesa/xli 16 color
(which also looks worse than greyscale).  Seejpeg is about 70K but I
forgot to check dependencies.  It does slide shows and quite a bit more.  
Is there any other REALLY basic and small viewer for BL3 that needs less
RAM than seejpeg?

> 
> Cheers,
> Steven