Ok, I am able to get maximum free memory on 14mb falcon afer mint of 11,176K. A make distclean runs out of memory even. So there is no way to build freemint on a stock falcon with gcc 2.95.3 even.And I'll have to update my compiler ...
So MiNT uses 2.9 MB - on one of my TTs I have 18.5 free of total 20 after boot-up, that's 1.5 MB for kernel+nvdi+shell.
You could size down your system to have 1.4 MB more free memory. But I think this won't make it much better.
When gcc4 memory usage is not more than 30% above the usage of 2.95, than we could leave 2.95, IMHO.
But that would be bad news for me .. -- Helmut Karlowski