&gt; I do remember a time when you could boot Windows XP on a system with 64MB of RAM when you needed special configuration &#x2F; custom kernels to boot Linux on such a system.<p>No, you&#x27;re misremembering. A Linux kernel has never needed anywhere near that much RAM to boot. The first machine I used Linux on had 8MB RAM and that was considered plenty at the time. I do remember KDE being pretty slow on a machine with 64MB...maybe you&#x27;re thinking of desktop environments.