On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 09:17:11AM +0300, Aleksandar Kostadinov wrote: > Hello, > > trying to make a print server from an old pentium 100 64M RAM. I had > to take that route because the USB<->parallel cables I've got don't > work. Anyways, first tried to install debian stable but it crashes on > boot. Something with the IDE controllers. btw I think there are some > nasty bugs with stable kernel because it crashes on a Intel core duo > laptop for other reasons. Anyways newer and older kernels work just > fine on these machines. So I went ahead and installed wheezy on the > machine (had to remove the vga=788 and quiet options, otherwise I > can't see the installer). > > Now the problem is that I can't install anything more on that machine > because apt-get update takes forever. It downloads package index from > the mirror but "reading package lists" step is so slow I'm not sure it > will ever complete. First 11% complete in a reasonable time but then > it seems it becomes slower as work progresses. Looking at the amount of RAM you have, I suspect that what's happening is that the first 11% of the work is able to fit into RAM, but then your system starts swapping. As far as I'm aware, Debian should run in 64M RAM, but it WILL need to swap a lot. I'm not entirely sure there's anything you can do about that except be patient. If you have room in your case for a second drive, you MAY eke a bit of speed out of it by putting a second drive in and putting the swap partition on that. That way, apt can be accessing the files (probably mostly on /var) while the kernel is sending data to the swap. At the moment these two functions are contending for time on the disk.
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