Re: Install on 4MB Atari TT

[Michael Schmitz <SCHMITZ@LCBVAX.CCHEM.BERKELEY.EDU>]

Hi,

>It is created by above lowmem install. When the regular rescue disk's
>boot image detects that you have less then 3500 kBytes free memory it
>requires /etc/swappartition, takes its content as the name of the
>to-be-used swap partition and enables this swap partition very early.

Ok, the facts on installing Debian on a 4 MB system:

* It's possible to boot the good old 1.4 MB ramdisk (filesys-2.0-whathaveyou)
  and do real work (i.e. mount the filesystem you dumped to disk, edit its
  fstab, maybe add /etc/swapdevice, ...). Caveat: that filesys has only sda and
  sdb device files, know your minor shift for SCSI...

* It doesn't seem to help; instead of checking the amount of free RAM, init 
  declares 'this is a low memory system' and refuses to work. I've tried
  different things, but no luck. /etc/swapdevice is present and points to 
  a swapfile, the roof fs is mounted rw, so I'm sure it would work. 
  (Booting the base system leaves me with 700 k free, not counting buffers 
  and swap)
  Moral: hardcoded limits are a Bad Thing.

Maybe using a swap device instead of swap file makes the difference, or
/etc/swapdevice has the wrong contents. Good luck figuring this out. 

	Michael