The live cd boots fine to the GNOME desktop in my 256 Ram 1.5 GHz P4, but when I try to install it to my hard drive, it says that I do not have enough Ram, and that I should try the text installer, liveinst -T. So I do, but its stupid. My disk arrangement is this:

/dev/hdb1 10 gb
/dev/hdb2 12 gb
/dev/hdb3 512 mb swap
/dev/hdb5 5 gb

I want to install on hdb2. I tried deleting the partition, but the text installer won't find it as free space.

What can I do?

P.S: Can I install it by hand?

Fedora system requirements for a graphical desktop are 384MB of RAM with at least 512MB being recommended. Running Gnome or KDE with even only 1GB of RAM can get rather painful, in actual practice though. A more limited desktop environment will make your life easier in the long run I suspect, and avoiding Firefox for that matter.

Your partitioning looks weird to me, as does your statement about wanting to install and then wanting to delete the partition you'd be installing to and "it's stupid." The usual approach is a /boot partition of along the lines of 512MB and a Logical Volume containing a / (root) and /swap with /home being added for the sake of best practices. You are operating off a second drive and hdb5 should be the extended partition under a MBR so I guess it doesn't matter that much.

If you're going to do it that way you can use the GNOME LiveCD GUI. Pull down the Program menu then Systems and Drive Utility should be it if I'm remembering correctly. That'll let you set them up as you like in terms of parting things out provided it's not using it, ala a active Swap partition. You'll then need to assign what they are with fdisk or the utility Fedora is using currently for that. Of course, you also would need a bootloader from hda (the master hard drive in IDE parlance) to do the hand off to boot it.

Really though I expect you'd be better off with something like Tinycore Linux given how little RAM you have. Here's an idea what that's like.

Says who?

But I do run GNOME on Fedora 11 already! If you turn off this manager and that monitor it's really just a panel with metacity.

Again, I do run Firefox, but I also like Opera.



No, see here, the gui installer won't run, and the text installer insists on installing to "free space", so I tried to give it free space by deleting a partition. What's wrong with my partitioning? An IDE drive can have 4 logical partitions and 7(?) extended partitions. I have 3 logical and 1 extended.
It is.

You don't mount swap.

I prefer good old fdisk.

Of course.

Thanks man.
I already run fedora 11, and in fact I do music production on it. See here.

I've seen people do nothing more than run Word on Seven on systems with 4gb ram. So clearly productivity is not proportional to the amount of ram you have.

The problem still remains - stupid python based anaconda won't run in gui mode in 256 mb ram

I see you don't bother to read release notes. 14 system requirements vs 11. That's actually in error via lowballing for a network install given this thread

See above. Gnome Desktop Environment is not a static entity. If you want to force the issue that's your business.

Yes, are you here asking for help or to troll? I gave you a nice clean way to deal with your inability to delete partitions, and you want to snark instead of solve the issue?

I never said it did. I pointed out it can be used in a LVM, which it can, and will be grabbed by LiveMedia putting it in use, which it will also do. Again are you here seeking a solution or just trolling?

Then what's your problem? If you have a Linux system setup the text installer should have an option to "overwrite" it.

I suppose you could boot into F11, mount the F14 image from the CD, dd everything in the mounted image to your new F14 partition on hdb2, clean up /etc/fstab on hdb2, install grub on hdb2, fix your grub.conf file on hda1 to chainload hdb2's grub, chen chroot to hdb2 and run dracut to create a valid initramfs. Yes, it's convoluted. Yes, it's a pain. No, I haven't done it for F14, and no, I'm not really recommending it. Just something to consider.

Occasionally when I try out an alpha or beta release on an older system I run into problems with the graphical installer. I've gotten around this two ways. One by doing a text install and the other by performing a graphical install over a VNC connection. If you do have another computer, I'd recommend trying a VNC install because you won't be able to customize your partitions with a text install (see below from the install guide).

8.15 Disk Partitioning Setup

Important — Installing in text mode
If you install Fedora in text mode, you can only use the default partitioning schemes described in this section. You cannot add or remove partitions or file systems beyond those that the installer automatically adds or removes. If you require a customized layout at installation time, you should perform a graphical installation over a VNC connection or a kickstart installation.
Furthermore, advanced options such as LVM, encrypted filesystems, and resizable filesystems are available only in graphical mode and kickstart.

Yeah, I didn't Sorry

No man, I understand now. Unsupported means unsupported.

Yeah, I'm a troll, like my father before me, and his father before that. In the day we sell vanity sunglasses and in the night we troll

I have to repeat myself here, but I do prefer fdisk. Silly old fashioned me

I'm reading from a pipe, and therefore seeking is not possible.

She just won't love me.

Yeah, it should have, and it could have, and it would have, but it didn't

Yes, but then it would boot exactly the same way from the hard disk as it would from the CD, and so it wouldn't save my settings.

I tried to do a text install, but the stupid anaconda installer won't recognize the partitions I made for it by hand, and it won't do partitioning itself. I don't have a second computer

DJ Shaji, Have you had a chance to take a look at VNC or kickstart? VNC is very easy provided you have a second computer. By using the kickstart option you can set up a configuration file and pick your partitions for a text install. Everything is done automatically. Options can be found in the install guide. After the install you can try to get Gnome to come up. I can post a sample kickstart file if you are interested.

Note: Might want to change the distribution in your profile to Fedora 11. At release 7 they stopped calling the distribution Fedora Core and refer to it only as Fedora. Also noticed that you used /dev/hdbX in your first post. The kernel has referred to hard drive partitions as /dev/sdbX.

Unfortunately I don't have a second computer. It would be great if you could post a sample kickstart file.

I only noticed it now - at startup it says "Welcome to Fedora" now. I wonder why they added Core to it in the first place?

FWIW, (which isn't much; it's a nasty process, but) if you do what I suggested, your end product will be a typical full HD install - no overlay, no isolinux/syslinux.

Just tried out the package system-config-kickstart. It is available on F11 as a graphical tool for building your own kickstart file (pretty slick). Here is a ks file I threw together. Notice the text mode install and disk partition sections.

Fedora run very fast using Fedora 14 LXDE try:
LXDE: The "Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment" is an extremely fast-performing and energy-saving desktop environment.
http://fedoraproject.org/es/get-fedora-options

It's not just that the installer won't work: it's that you will be short of memory if you do install. I'm using Fedora at the moment, with just Opera running and all unnecessary services turned off. The processes are running in 196MB, which sounds as if it would be fine with 256MB. But the system is using another 278MB for buffers and caches. It's doing that to give me a faster and more responsive system, and I'd notice a difference if it couldn't.

If you install from the DVD, rather than the live CD, you can skip Gnome and use Xfce (very similar in style), but that only saves about 30MB (although every little helps).

To get a good system, you really need either
1. another menory card
2. a distro that's happy in 256MB: CrunchBang, Salix, Zenwalk... (all Xfce).