Use swap to install Debian?
 

I've got a very low-ram system. I'm trying to install Debian, but it's giving me problems. I've already got a 128Mb swap partition on my hard drive. Is there any way to configure the installer to use this swap space in addition to the little ram I have?

Thanks!

How low is "very low"? 64MB? Sigh :(

Swap is used as "RAM" when RAM is short of space. It will be S-L-O-W. 128MB is small for swap, bump it up to 512MB and see what happens. It may be slow, but eventually, it'll probably be functional, maybe you can live with this.

A better idea might be to use a minimal linux distro that doesn't need much RAM: Consider puppy, DSL etc.

I had the same problem years ago on a 32Meg system. Linux would use swap and when Linux was paging to the swap partition the system ran very slow. The installer did not use swap so when the graphical installer ran out of RAM it froze. I had to use the command line installer which used less memory. I don't know of any way to tell the installer to use swap. If the Debian CLI installer doesn't work then you should take tredegar's suggestion and look for a distribution which has a smaller installer.

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Steve Stites

Yeah, I'm already running DSL, I'll probably stick with it. I was hoping to experiment with Debian, way more packages and stuff, but DSL should do for now. Thanks!