Martin Hicks wrote: > You're running X. That'll take up a lot of memory all by itself. > try running "top" and then hit "M" to sorty by Memory usage. The most > interesting columns are RES and SHR (Resident memory size and Shared > memory). > Ordinarily people see that "Free" is very small but have a large > "Buffers" value...but 256MB isn't that much by modern standards and > X/Gnome/KDE are memory pigs. I wouldn't call X a memory pig. I've got it running just fine on my old laptop with 128MB of RAM. The real memory pigs are with the desktop environments (KDE, Gnome, XFCE). Running Ubuntu with just 256MB is pushing it because Ubuntu defaults to a lot of RAM hungry apps (Gnome, OpenOffice, Firefox). I'd suggest either adding more RAM or going with a more lightweight distro (i.e. Fluxbuntu ).