suse 9.1 can't create swapspace
 

Hi! I've got suse 9.1 personal onto two machines perfectly well. On an HP with Amd Athlon, only 64k ram, and a big hard drive running Win98, it loads kernel, says not enough memory for yast, and needs to create swapdisk. suggests /dev/sda2. if i give it that, or anything else, red message says 'error activating swapspace' - and that's it. no way round it... Anyone any ideas?

maybe if you made a special partition for the swapspace?... cfdisk can change the filesystem type. Select the swapspace type from there :D

thanks... i AM a newbie... so how would i run cfdisk?? if that's a linux prog.... that is

when you get to a command prompt, you'll probably see this:
simply type cfdisk there

cfdisk is a partition manager that writes the partition table. It runs in linux (:D) and usually it is a "default" package shipped with linux... just type cfdisk :)
(fdisk is cfdisk's older brother... but i prefer cfdisk because it is more user-friendly)

MB rather than k?
I installed Suse on a PC with 80 MB RAM. Text/command line only. Same problem.
I got my Debian Woody rescue and root floppies.
Do just enough to get to the menu and choose partition a hard drive. You can use cfdisk to create a swap partition from free space. (You know not to try to resize partitions with cfdisk, right?)
After creating the swap partition you then need to choose initialize and activate a swap partition.
After that Suse can use the swap partition during install.
Yast (ncurses version) will run but it will be as slow molasses. Some functions take 5-10 minutes or longer.
Even in text mode, Suse is not a good choice for a low RAM PC.
Another choice is to put Zipslack on your Windows 98 partition. It is command line only but you can add Slackware packages to it.

thanks to all the above! As the CD never gets anywhere near producing a command line, I guess I will need to boot from a floppy, and hope that cfdisk is on it... Incidentally, i can't get the 'live' CD of 9.1 Personal to run on any of the machines!

The Debian floppies are here.
If you get the rescue.bin and root.bin, write them to floppy with "dd" in Linux or "rawrite" in Windows, you can do as I mentioned above.