Hi everyone!

I recently installed Fedora Core 3 on an old computer (Pentium, I think) with 64mb of RAM. It was very painful to do because the computer doesn't boot to CD, so I had to figure out a way to install it... but that's a different story.

Anyway, I did a custom install and specified the minimum number of packages to be installed. I installed the X-Windows thing (yeah, I'm a noob ), graphical internet package and administration tools. I did not install Gnome, nor did I install KDE or anything else. I figured that I would use yum to install any extra stuff if I needed to install anything else.

So here's the problem. When I do "yum update", or "yum install" (or anything else with yum), it takes forever to do whatever it is I told it to do. It's not the servers in the yum.conf because I've setup the same version of Fedora on other, better, computers and it updates very quickly. I'm on a DSL line. I know for certain it's not the connection because it spends more time processing than it does downloading--WAY more.

My questions are the following: Why does it take so long to process the MD data (1+ hour)? The hard drive on the computer is being accessed almost non-stop, which leads me to think that it might just need more RAM, could this be the culprit? Is there anything I could do to increase the amount of available RAM?

I would appreciate any help or advice on this matter.

Thanks,
moniker117

You can check the available free memory by typing "free" in a console. If fedora is eating all your memory I don´t know if there is something reasonably easy that you could do because fedora is a memory devourer titan.

If I were you I would take a look at http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ this is probably the best distro for such kind of hardware.

Yum needs a lot of RAM. 64 MB is not enough. It also needs a fairly fast CPU. Recent versions of yum (e.g. in Fedora Core 4 Development) are a bit speedier, because they use an SQLite database. But your hardware simply is out-of-date.