Oh, I know, but I've been happily using CentOS 6 on my 128MB box, and was looking forward to CentOS 7.

It looks like the listed minimum for RHEL 6 was 1gb[1]. I don't think 128 was officially supported even then, so if you're happy with how it works now, you may still be happy with 7.

1) http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/unix/linux/install_RHEL6.h...

The installer requires 406mb of ram to work: http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS7#head-281...

Would it be possible to assign swap to a removable media device and then bootstrap the installer to run in that environment on a device with 128mb?

Probably. You'll have to hack the install procedure to enable swapping before it's being run though.

If you're serious about trying this, the fastest path is to install CentOS in a VM on a suitable machine that isn't going to spend a day in the installer swapping like crazy, and copy the image to a physical drive which you eventually stuff into the ancient low memory box.

> I've been happily using CentOS 6 on my 128MB box

I used to do that too, but then I figured there's a constructive use I could give to my old desktops when any such system reaches the age of replacement - just max it out on RAM and declare it a "home server". Now I can run a Minecraft node for my kids on it - with 2GB of Java heap, no less.

I mean, my Raspberry Pi has more than 128 MB of RAM.

Lots of RAM - like chicken soup for your server.

Oh, RAM sticks are cheap, esp. for old machines. This is true. But I use a VPS, and the 128MB instances are cheap enough to be worth taking ten minutes to shut off junk services (which improves security anyway).

It might be worth trying to install it on a larger instance, save the image, and re-launch it into a 128 MB instance. It might work that way.

When I'm building tiny Debian images, I use debootstrap, which doesn't seem to use much RAM at all.

There used to be a Fedora equivalent called febootstrap, but it looks like it's mutated a bit since then: http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/supermin/

You may be able to work around it that way.

Out of interest, what machine are you using CentOS 6 on? I find 128mb kinda tight - although I've recently found a VPS provider who's managed to get Debian Jessie working in 96!

Once upon the time I created "rinse" which is an RPM-using debootstrap-like tool.

I've handed that off now, but the project is still very much alive:

http://collab-maint.alioth.debian.org/rinse/

BuyVM, $15/year

The good news is BuyVM just announced they are preparing a CentOS 7 image, so the installer RAM limit may not matter.

You are right that 128mb is a bit tight, I have problems with some services that just gobble memory. Apache+PHP are terrible in that regard.

Granted it is an Enterprise level distro with iscsi, storage drivers, xfs as default, other relatively heavy things in it included by default. Running on smaller machines was never a goal, if it did, it was probably accidental.

I don't even know if they have an ARM port (maybe an ARM 64bit for those new hip low wattage ARM microservers).