not enough memory for YaST
 

I am trying to install Suse 8.0 on an old PC I inherited from work. (I've intalled this distribution on another old PC without any problem, though it booted from the cd and YaST did everything). I can now boot the system with a bootdisk and load the kernel but when YaST tries to start I get a message to the effect of I don't have enough memory and am asked to specify somewhere else to get the memory (sorry for the lack of technical detail--I'm at work and trying to recall what happened earlier today).

The hard drive in the PC has Windows 95 and a lot of other software, none of which I wan't. This will be a dedicated Linux machine. I've added RAM to the machine already and uninstalled as many programs as I could.

Is this going to be a partition problem? What can I do next? How can I get rid of Windows?

Any help is appreciated. I'm enjoying the challenge.

Welcome to LQ. It would be best to provide some specific details about the machine, and the better context you can provide, the better responses you can/will receive to your question. It's difficult to evaluate whether you have enough RAM without knowing if you're dealing with 32Mg or 512Mg, or somewhere in between.

If you've got Win95 installed an no longer need it, the Yes, it would be safe to simply drop that partition(s) and start fresh. In fact, if you have the ability to start with a clean slate, I'd blow away everything, spend some time on my partitioning scheme, then install Linux. There are countless existing threads here at LQ about partitioning; I'd suggest doing a Search on them first -- partitioning is a matter of personal prefence, and there is no right or wrong answer. Good luck -- J.W.

I'm not sure about suse 8.0, but 9.0 and 9.1 will complain lack of mem if you have less than 128. Between 64 and 128 they will ask to create a swap. We're talking about install-time.
To run suse+kde+a few apps, you'd better have 128 minimum. Or else, try to install lighter desktops managers, such as fluxbox.

Ok, here's the deal. YaST is putting all of it's files on your RAM to run. Since you don't have enough RAM it needs a swap partition. A swap partition is similar to ram except it exists on a hard drive and is slower than RAM. This is a very crude hack, but it will work without a hitch. Take a spare hard drive that's sitting around and put it in a working computer. Use the YaST partition tool to create a single 2048MB swap partition as /dev/hda1. Then put this hard drive into the machine you want to install from. When it asks for swap, enter /dev/hda1. Then it will use that swap and continue on normally, albeit slower than a granny. If you have other hard drives in that machine, your swap drive could be /dev/hdb1, /dev/hdc1, /dev/hde1, you get the idea. Or you could remove the hard drive that is already in the installation machine and create a swap on that. If the hard drive has less than 10GB, don't create a swap larger than 1024MB.

Enjoy.

When you write "working computer" do you mean one that already has linux installed?

Yes.

I've "solved" some of my memory problems. Turns out I had a SIMM installed improperly. I also learned that the HD I was trying to use was only 128MB (it came out of a workstation on a network). I am trying to install damnsmalllinux on this drive next.

In the meantime, I did get SuSE 8.0 installed on another HD in the aforementioned old workstation from work. It now consists of 64MB RAM and ~3GB HD, processor is Pentium 100. Unfortunately the video is built on the motherboard and it sucks. The icons and images look fuzzy and I seem to be missing colors (?). Ah well. I'll do some more research on the video/monitor problems and post a new thread if needed.

Thanks again for the tips--I especially liked the idea of using an extra HD for swap.