What are the requirements to boot ariane?
To run ariane you need a "normal, not too old" PC, more precise:
- at least 192MB RAM,
- an i586 processor (or compatible), a 486 will not work,
- an IDE CD-ROM drive from which the PC can boot.
No harddisk installation is required (but possible, see ArianeHardDiskInstallation).
Optionally you might have
- a floppy drive,
- a PXE network card.
The system needs 192MB because 128MB are allocated for ariane's ramdisk. The ramdisk size could be changed because ariane requires actually something around 64MB. But this is difficult since it requires a kernel change (the way the ramdisk is allocated is clearly out of date and, by the way, not supported in the 2.6.x kernel series). Furthermore I don't expect to be 192MB RAM or more to be a problem. On the other hand, 128MB for the ramdisk leaves enough space for additions to the basic ariane system.
Another odd thing might be the libc version. It might become a problem when you want to customize ariane with programs that link against libc (every program that is not a script). Today's Linux distribution ship usually with libc version 2.3.x which is not compatible with ariane's version. I also don't know which standard distributions came with the 2.2.4 libc since the linux behind ariane was compiled from scratch, see http://www.linuxfromscratch.org.