“The purpose of this mini HOWTO is to describe how to run Linux
on a system with a small amount of memory. Assuming buying more
memory is out of the question there are many things you can do to
tighten up memory usage in Linux.”
“Many Linux distributions out of the box are quite bloated
from a memory perspective. They run more services and offer more
features then most of us will ever need. By removing many of
these services you can free up several megabytes of real
memory.”
“My own system is a 486DX2-66 with 12MB of physical memory and
12MB of swap space. It has run Linux for the last 3 years quite
happily and hopefully it will run Linux for several more years.
:)”