[conspire] More relevant to the origins of this list.

[Michael Paoli]

At RAM of 256MiB & 512MiB, those are way too lowely for current or
supported Ubuntu, though perhaps (barely) some other *buntu variants
might (barely) work.

However, what would be highly feasible, go with current Debian - either
stable ... or if you're up for (much) more frequent updates and
leading/bleeding edge, possibly even testing or unstable.
Just do a base install - that'll be pretty light on memory ... quite
light.  I know I currently have installs of those at 512 MiB RAM.
Might work okay(ish) with 256 MiB RAM ... hmmm, ... let's see
(edit virtual machine configuration ... 512 MiB --> 256 MiB)
oh heck, don't even need to bother to try that:
   <memory unit='KiB'>131072</memory>
... been running that just fine ... but that's without any X at all.
(and not sure why it says KiB when it shows size in bytes ... perhaps
KiB is the smallest granularity by which it can be adjusted).

Anyway, if you start with just bare base install (deselect all optional
software when installing), you'll get a very tight small minimal installation.
Then one can judiciously add ... X, some low-memory Window Manager (and not
any full Desktop Environment), add languages (Python, ...), etc.
Should be able to get quite functional systems up without all that much
RAM needed.  Also, with low RAM, adding more than ample swap will
help.  Sure, may be a performance hit - but that's generally preferable
to running out of RAM.  For such low mem systems, I'd probably recommend
going 4x RAM on the swap size.

Ah, ... I thought that teeny weeny one I'd been playin' around with
was stable ... it's still oldstable.  Anyway, stable might push the
usage up slightly ... but not all that much.  Anyway, a peek at it,
after I've fired it up:
# cat /etc/debian_version; free; df -h
9.9
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache    
available
Mem:         117124       48668        4240         856       64216     
    62428
Swap:       1046524        1320     1045204
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev             47M     0   47M   0% /dev
tmpfs            32M  1.5M   31M   5% /run
/dev/vda1       2.9G  794M  2.0G  29% /
tmpfs            58M     0   58M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs            58M     0   58M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs            12M     0   12M   0% /run/user/0
#
But that's also without X and such.  However, one can see, it's
pretty light on resource consumption (and I do have sshd and bind9 running
on it presently).

> From: Texx <texxgadget at gmail.com>
> Subject: [conspire] More relevant to the origins of this list.
> Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2020 14:17:44 -0700

> I decided to light up 2 machines out of my junkpile and see if they still
> worked.
> Both machines have 600mhz celerons.
> One of them came up with a dirty FS and took a couple rounds of FSCK.
>
> Imagine my shock, however when I found both running Kubuntu,
> one with quarter gb & 1 with half gig memory and both performed just fine!
>
> I remember bringing in a quarter gig machine last year with a faster proc
> that was only useable on cli.
> Windowing just didnt work.
>
> These 2 Kubuntu machines ran windowing just fine.
>
> What a surprise!
>
> I havent put them on the net, so theres no way to upgrade the python or any
> other utilities
> I need to get a home lab going.
>
> My Python is coming along.  Still need to get practice with Docker &
> Kubernetes.