OS recommendation to run Java Swing App on very basic hardware

Question

We have a Client/Server POS application.

For the Java Swing Client, we are evaluating a system with very basic hardware

• Celeron 300 CPU expandable to PIII 1.2 Ghz.
• 810 E motherboard.
• 64 MB SD RAM, DIMM's, expandable to 256 MB.
• 4.3 GB HDD expandable to 80 GB and above.
• 10 / 100, ethernet / lan card for connecting to server, broadband --- connectivity etc.
• 56 Kbps fax modem voice V 90.
• Sound card.
• Compact keyboard.
• 2 stereo speakers in built.
• Touchpad mouse in built in the keyboard.
• 3 USB 1.1 ports.
• 14" colour monitor, 0.28 DP, 1024 x 768 integrated.

Is it at all possible to run a Java Swing App on a system with 64MB RAM? If yes, what lightweight version of a free OS would you recommend? (Puppy Linux, something else?)

This system will only need to run the Java Swing application.

Thank you

Answer 1

You might want to think about the actual app's memory requirements as well. Its not just 'swing', as you cannot assume that any spec that can handle swing can handle your app.

Answer 2

Have a look at the various JEOS flavors ("Just enough operating system").

Answer 3

I would suggest creating a virtual machine (in vmware/virtualbox/whatever) with these specifications in terms of RAM and diskspace and then do some experiments. What is the bottleneck of the application - CPU usage? Graphics update speed? Memory usage for the JVM? Disk IO?

If you want to use Linux, I would personally start with investigating Damn Small Linux.

You will most likely need to find a JVM which runs well when embeddable, as the normal Sun JVM uses memory to gain speed.

Answer 4

It's defintely possible to run a modestly-sized Swing app in 64MB. Heck, in the Java 1.2 days, 64MB was considered a decent development machine, and in fact I did some of my first Java programming using Netbeans on a 64MB Linux machine.

Apart from a lean Linux distro, you should also investigage which JVM to use. It might be a good idea to run on an older VM, since those were designed to work with less RAM. You should also investigate the command line options that Sun's JVMS (others probably too) offer for fine-tuning memory usage.