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Comment by steckerbrett | Hacker News Reader

64MB is pretty restricting for most things people would want to run on a Raspberry Pi, the text says you can run Debian on it but that feels like it would be pretty tight. That said, the thing is stupidly cheap for driving small displays (huh, it's analogue RGB though) with as a complete system, and the amount of GPIO available is quite incredible. I'll be excited to buy one to play with if the shipping doesn't double the cost.

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Of course you can run Debian with 64 MB RAM. I ran Linux on a 200 MHz Pentium with 32 MB for years as my only computer. It was perfectly fine.

You probably didn't run a current Debian, though; things have grown a bit. The current official "recommended minimum" memory is 128MB, though they mention it's possible to get away with less: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch03s04.html.en

I agree, debian hasn't ran in 64MB for a very long time now. Just try launching 'aptitude' and /that/ will just explode in your face.

You can always swap on the SD card.?. >:->

You can put Debian on a lego mindstorms EV3 [1], and the environment has just as much ram, with a slower CPU I think. Yet booting was fine, and I was able to run a simple servo rocker with sensor feedback in python just fine.

[1] http://www.ev3dev.org/

It's also got an LVDS port, which a lot of open frame monitors support, or get a dongle to convert it to hdmi.

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