Hi,

I recently tried installing debian with the 3.1 netinstall cd, but it seems the installation needs more then 20MB ram and can't start :/. Is there any way to get debian installed on a system with 20MB ram?

I was also interested in trying vector linux, which I'll do now. But from it's website I saw minimum requirement 32MB ram so.. :/

(I gonna investigate the debian site a little further now)

grtz

gunnix

Using text install? Creating a swap for install to use? Where does it fail? Never boots? Error message?

Yea using textinstall. I don't remember the error anymore, but it was after where you get the boot menu.
I didn't think of creating a swap, I guess with a swap it would probably work.

But I'm not going to try to install it anymore until I get a second hand ISA network card.

I was just wondering if it's suddenly impossible to install one of the big distro's on an old 486 with 20mb ram as slackware (I first thought of installing that) is now compiled for a 586 or 686.

grtz

gunnix

Requirements are going up all the time. I installed Zipslack 7.1 on a 386 with 4MB RAM once. Lately I have decided at least 16MB is minimum for a functional text install. This may be going up again.
Looking at my Slack 10.2 packaging it states 486 and so does the site. I have not tried low end installs with 10.2 yet.
Have you though about using Zipslack? Check the requirements. Sometimes copying and unzipping it with the drive in another PC will get it running. You'd need to use a boot floppy until you ran Lilo.

thx for your suggestions. I'l try zipslack out today.
I had started the vector linux installation yesterday, but after about 12 hours it only got to 2 percent .

I'll pop the harddrive in my newer computer, format it to fat and put zipslack on it and put it back.

grtz

Someone on the debian-laptop mailing list managed to get a Debian install onto a laptop with 16mb ram. They originally installed the Woody release, but once installed I'm sure you could upgrade. (However long that might take). Their query was mainly about what graphical environments they could use.
You can read all about it here
http://lists.debian.org/debian-lapto.../msg00004.html

Thx for that link Que_273 !

I tried Deli Linux yesterday, it worked good except that lilo didn't start by itself and I had to use a boot floppy. On the other hand I didn't like it that installing slack 7.1 packages didn't work.

Then I realized that I still have some slack 9.1 cd's lying here and I'm installing that now

As for debian, I see it is possible but I will not try it anymore if slackware works good. As it doesn't really matter so much for me if it is slackware or debian, as long as it is a stable linux or bsd with cool terminal applications, screen and bash

grtz

It shouldn't matter much which distro you choose, although Debian will give you a nice clean base system with easy package management.

Sarge installer does lots of automated checks which probably use extra RAM, choosing the "expert" option might work better. And Woody installer should be less memory-intensive -- it's still supported as "oldstable" in official Debian repos (and there are backports for getting newer software).

Bash is a really heavy shell for a RAM challenged system -- maybe you could manage with some lighter shell, like tcsh? I'd recommend 2.4 kernel and ext2 filesystem.

NetBSD or FreeBSD might also be worth trying. FreeBSD boots really fast, which could become a great convenience on a machine machine with a slow CPU.

Well...yes and no on this point. Remember that there are a number of distributions out there now that are Pentium class or better only, and will not install on a 486. Mandrake (mandriva? Heck, that was news to me) comes to mind.

Got slack installed now, but just as with deli linux I get this when booting and can only boot with a boot floppy:

L 40 40 40 40

and many more 40's.

I did a search on google and tried some of the suggestions I found for changes in lilo.conf , but still no success. It's probably because the motherboard doesn't support the hd's size which is 1200MB.

Has anyone here had the same problems and how to get it fixed?

grtz,
gunnix

PS: I wouldn't mind it if this topic is moved to linux distributions instead of debian in specific.

You could try using grub.

One advantage is that it's capable of reading filesystems so if you "forget" to update the mbr after a new kernel you can still manually put in the partition and image path and it will boot. The syntax is different though but not difficult.

I installed grub, and got an error code. That error code let me right to the info I needed on google. I ofcourse had to make my boot partition within the first 500MB of the hd or it wouldn't work the old bios. Now I made a 30MB /boot/ partition and everyone works great. Now it has slack 9.1 on it. I gonna see what I can do with it, when I get the network card I could probably use it as a terminal. For now I saw it's also nice to write stuff with vim

I gonna see if it can play mp3's with mp3blaster, mp3's on my p1 166mhz take about 10% cpu, so that should maybe work on a 50mhz as well

I tried starting X once, but I won't try that again. It's too damn slow.

grtz
gunnix

Just a few days ago I tried installing Sarge to bochs (http://bochs.sourceforge.org) virtual disk (used under qemu - http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/). I asigned 16 Mb of space to the install. It didn't work even with expert install. But it did run with 32 Mb. If you have 14 cd (or 2dvd) set, there are a lot low memory software that can be used in limited memory environment.

Maybe there is another way of running Sarge at 8-16Mb? If not there are a plenty of alternatives. But the question is how current is the software for such distros. Any experiencies with that?

BTW, I recommend installing under emulated environments (with emulators like those mentioned above) on a modern system, before trying to do actual install. Bochs is very usable at emulating limited memory/slow machines. So, you could "test" installation within, and then, after you see if it can be done, then work with the real system.