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Re: Low Memory Support...



On Thu, 18 Nov 1999, Fabrice Gautier wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 14, 1999 at 09:08:00PM -0700, Bruce Sass wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I've had some experience with low-mem systems.
> > Is there anything in particular that was giving you problems?
> 
> 
> Yes,
> 
> With the lowmem boot-floppy (from 2.1 or 2.0) it is said that you should
> creat a temporary root partition (minix fs) to replace a ramdisk.
> So do i, and i created a linux partition and a swap. And then during the
> install i couldn't initialize the swap (in fact it where already initialized
> and used during the first boot with lowmem boot floppy) 
> So someone told that there was a bug, and another guy told me to create TWO
> swap partitions (a little temporary swap used with the temporary minix root
> partition and a bigger to be used normally)

The swap problem can be fixed on the fly, switch to another VC and issue
a "swapoff" command... 
then go back to VC1 and initialize the swap partition.

> And so i think i really succeded in installing all the stuff but i was never
> able to boot the system for the final config (you know: root password and
>  such)  bash complains : "not enough memory" and there was somme
> "cannot fork" and so on....

Hmmm, I've run slink with 4M RAM and a 40M HDD, with the stock kernel...
but I never tried it without swap space (I assume that is still the
problem at this point).

> I tried to compile another smaller kernel but it is not something easy
> to do for i only have a potato desktop PC with a 2.2 kernel and i wanted
> to compile a 2.0 kernel for the slink laptop and i messed a few things
> on my desktop PC. So i gave up.

A smaller kernel is better, no doubt about that!  :)
You can also install "ash", linking it to /bin/sh (BIG difference on a
slow machine); "mingetty" is another good one on a small system (edit
/etc/init to use it instead of "getty").

There are a couple of other hoops you can jump through to get the
install to go faster... but I can only recall one of them: delete all
the unnecessary drivers (/target/lib/modules/2.0.36/...) before
they are setup.  Memory use peaks when the drivers are being installed,
and it takes a loong time for modconf(?) to make the nice dialog
boxes when there are lots of drivers; trashing the drivers cures both of
these (humm) problems.


later,

	Bruce


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