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Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

(www.tinycorelinux.net)
518 points LorenDB | 4 comments | 06 Dec 25 14:18 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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trollbridge ◴[06 Dec 25 15:15 UTC] No.46173936[source]▶
Not to disrespect this, but it used to be entirely normal to have a GUI environment on a machine with 2MB of RAM and a 40MB disk.

Or 128K of ram and 400 kb disk for that matter.

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maccard ◴[06 Dec 25 15:26 UTC] No.46174032[source]▶
A single 1920x1080 framebuffer (which is a low resolution monitor in 2025 IMO) is 2MB. Add any compositing into the mix for multi window displays and it literally doesn’t fit in memory.
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echoangle ◴[06 Dec 25 15:40 UTC] No.46174159[source]▶
Do you really need the framebuffer in RAM? Wouldn't that be entirely in the GPU RAM?
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ErroneousBosh ◴[06 Dec 25 17:29 UTC] No.46175002[source]▶
Computers didn't used to have GPUs back then when 150kB was a significant amount of graphics memory.
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1. trollbridge ◴[06 Dec 25 22:55 UTC] No.46177337[source]▶
The IBM PGC (1984) was a discrete GPU with 320kB of RAM and slightly over 64kB of ROM.

The EGA (1984) and VGA (1987) could conceivably be considered a GPU although not turning complete. EGA had 64, 128, 192, or 256K and VGA 256K.

The 8514/A (1987) was Turing complete although it had 512kB. The Image Adapter/A (1989) was far more powerful, pretty much the first modern GPU as we know them and came with 1MB expandable to 3MB.

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2. ErroneousBosh ◴[07 Dec 25 10:07 UTC] No.46180590[source]▶
Neither EGA or VGA were "GPUs", they were dumb framebuffers. Later VGA chipsets had rudimentary acceleration, basically just blitters - but that was a help.

The PGC was kind of a GPU if you squint a bit. It didn't work the way a modern GPU does where you've got masses of individual compute cores working on the same problem, but it did have a processor roughly as fast as the host processor that you could offload simple drawing tasks to. It couldn't do 3D stuff like what we'd call a GPU today does, but it could do things like solid fills and lines.

In today's money the PGC cost about the same as an RTX PRO 6000, so no-one really had them.

3. Yeask ◴[07 Dec 25 14:25 UTC] No.46181872[source]▶
A video card is not a GPU.
4. lproven ◴[08 Dec 25 12:16 UTC] No.46191382[source]▶
> The 8514/A (1987) was Turing complete

WTF? Tell me more!

I have one, but I have no matching screen so I never tried it... Maybe it's worth finding a converter.