I have been trying to install linux onto my older system, P133, 48 MB ram, 40 gig HD. I tried Mandrake and it kept telling me the image was corrupt (the MD5 checksum from linuxiso.org matched so I assume it is my setup it didn;t like) I am onto Redhat hoping it would work better, but now halfway through installation I get this great message that aborts installation and even trying to recover ends in the same error message.
the last called function in the error code is here:

File "/usr/lib/anaconda/iutil.py", line 66, in execwithredirect childpid = os.fork()
OSerror [errno 12] cannot allocate memory

Any ideas as to what I should try to finish my install? , including which linux release I should use if you think Redhat isn't the way to go would be appreciated. Thnx.

Snowlock

RedHat is a pig these days, it'll do alright if you don't care about a GUI, but getting X to run on 48Mb of RAM under any current distro is going to be a bit of a pain.

During the redhat boot process it should still give you the option of a text install, from what I remember of 7.2 it took a minimum of 64Mb to run the GUI installer. If its not an option on the CD any longer, I know it still is on the boot floppy installer.

If anything else, you may want to try Debian or Slackware, both of which run much cleaner on older hardware. Debian is only going to put on a bare minimum and then you apt-get your way upwards while every install option in Slack is basically an "expert" install.

Luck,

Finegan