Install Fedora with VERY little RAM
 

Ok here is my comp:
Dell Dimension 4550
Pentium 4
I have no idea what my GH is
i386 der
256 Megs of RAM (technically 255 one MB reserved for BIOS settings)
Fedora DVD installer
No Internet Whatsoever Downloaded on different computer than burnt
It gets stuk at:
Trying to read bootft as inisomething
I have read about people having trouble with 512megs of ram is it even viable to install fedora? Can anyone help? I want the DVD installation because I don't have Internet and Kubuntu's reliance on Internet is starting to get on my nerves... Sorry didn't see the instalation forum... Admin could you move this please I don't think I can...

Go for Lubuntu or Vector Linux

I would install more memory, like two 512MB sticks if you can
afford it. That will be enough for any OS out at the moment. :)

phil

256MB is nowhere enar enough for fedora 15-

http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora

As long as you dont want the absolute newest packages, debian stable is (IMO) worth trying for offline use. You can d/l the whole repo on DVDs if you want.

I have an old box, much like yours, on which I installed a minimal, no GUI, Fedora. But that was quite painfully slow. (Later I cannibalized a couple other old boxes I had and upped the memory to 512Mb, which let me install an run an XFCE desktop.) Buying new RAM for an old box is prohibitively expensive since those chips have been out of production for several years now, but you can sometimes find old chips are electronics recycle shops.

May I ask why you're trying to install Fedora on such an old system? I only did it because I wanted to scavenge files from some IDE drives, and my last USB enclosure for 3.5" parallel drive failed. Since I had those old systems with parallel drive controllers, and no other need for an old USB drive enclosure, it seemed a good thing to try.

I would advise against a fedora installation on such little memory. There are other distributions (Slitaz, puppy, DamnSmall Linux) that work very well on old hardware, as well as streamlined installations of Debian and Slackware being usable on underpowered machines. If you must use fedora for whatever reason maybe the LXDE spin would work, but don't expect great performance. If you don't need the GUI then you may want to skip it entirely.

Ok then...

256MB was low even a few years ago. With everything growing in size, that little RAM is going to be stretched further. I'd say if you can, try to add more to your system. The good news these days is that RAM memory is growing exponentially, so you can get 8GB of DDR3 for under $40. Newegg does sell some SDRAM, but it's only for 256MB and 512MB modules.

However, if you still want to stay in Red Hat camp, Scientific Linux makes a custom IceWM CD called LiveMiniCD for which its used for older computers. I don't know if the install will work, but you can give it a try. It might also help to enable a swap partition if the installer doesn't work.