Thread: Maemo 6 / Harmattan on N900?
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jjx is offline jjx
2009-11-02 , 02:57
Posts: 474 | Thanked: 283 times | Joined on Oct 2009 @ Oxford, UK
#119
Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles View Post
Out of interest, what operating system?
Ubuntu 9.10 - Karmic Koala.

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles View Post
Most modern operating systems are designed to use as much RAM as available, so using those numbers as a benchmark to determine how capable a machine with less RAM would be.
It's not really like that. OSes try to use all the available RAM for caching files and other things, but applications running on the OS don't try to use all the available RAM :-) And I was measuring the RAM used by Firefox.

However, Firefox (and other web browsers) may be a rare example of applications which do use more RAM depending on the amount you have, because browsing is so cache dependent, and it might also use more RAM when you have a larger screen.

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles View Post
For example, the WebKit-based browser on my 8GB desktop machine is using 584.5MB of real memory and 1.04GB of virtual memory. So, clearly, WebKit wont run on the 256MB N900, right?
:-) Well, seriously, how many tabs/windows can you open on your N900 (if you have one) to random typical web pages?

I agree, Gecko != Firefox too. Sorry, mention of Firefox may have been a distraction.

More to the point, a laptop with 256MB cannot run very much these days, with any current major desktop OS. (Yes, ones which are optimised for small memory will work). That means the mobile OS is somewhat different in architecture as well as different usage and capabilities, to fit everything into that much.

Which means it's quite possible Maemo 6 may need more, just from wanting to do different things with it.

Of course it might use less if Qt is as good as I've heard ;-)