[ale] linux on a 486

[Wandered Inn]

Ben Coleman wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 06 Aug 2001 07:28:03 -0400, Wandered Inn wrote:
> 
> >I've been attempting to load linux on a challenging system.  It's a 486
> >with 8 meg of ram.  Mandrake tells you up front to forget it, Red Hat
> >will begin to boot, but a couple steps into the install process tells
> >you you don't have enough memory.  I fell back on the tried and true
> >Slackware which appears to work with limited systems.  In spite of the
> >fact that the docs for 8.0 tell you the install requires 16 MB minimum.
> >I figured I'd fire it up, create some extra swap and go with it.  Well,
> >I get to the point where it's installing the devs package and, well it's
> >still there two days later.  I can go to other virtual consoles and do
> >limited stuff, but they begin to hang as well.  I could drop back to an
> >earlier version of slack which I know has worked on this box in the
> >past, but I'd like to go with latest greatest stuff if possible.
> 
> Check the file LOWMEM.TXT on the Slackware install disk for some hints.
>  You'll probably want 32MB Swap and you may want to use the lowmem.i
> boot disk instead of bare.i.


lowmem.i doesn't have network support, and I'm attempting a nfs
install.  Also, for those of you who may enjoy the old floppy install,
it's apparently been removed from Slack 8 as well. :(

By the way, the LOWMEM.TXT file does say the minimum ram is 16 MB, but
I'd love to prove them wrong. :)  Although further in the same doc, they
make mention that a 4mb machine chokes on bare.i, so "it's probably time
for installation to machines with less than 8 megabytes to become
officially unsupported" which would seem to indicate that I might still
be in luck

There's no reference to my approach of adding a large chunk of swap to
supplement the limited ram.  They do say you can borrow memory along
with a large chunk of swap, so we'll see how this goes.  I'm stepping
through it slowly right now, and when it fails, I switch to a virtual
console and do the install of the failed part by hand.  Who knows if
this will work, but I'll post a summary once it completes.


> 
> Ben
> --
> Ben Coleman oloryn at benshome.net      | The attempt to legislatively
> http://oloryn.home.mindspring.com/   | micromanage equality results, at
> Amateur Radio NJ8J                   | best, in equal misery for all.
> 
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