lowmem floppy install fails
I use boot.img, root.img, net-drivers.img from the
sarge-i386-netinst.iso of 2004-05-29.
HW: mid-1990s laptop (486DX4+SL 100MHz, 24MB RAM, 520MB HD)
with floppy disk, PCMCIA-net, VGA colour graphics, sound,
serial and parallel port, but no USB/CD-ROM/firewire.
Whether in simple or in expert mode, a lot of udebs are
downloaded, which I would like to prevent: firewire, jfs,
lvm, md, reiserfs, ntfs, xfs, scsi, sata...
Worse, the download of one or another "useless" (for me!)
component fails:
[!!] Download installer components
Failed to load installer component
Loading reiserfsprogs-udeb failed for unknown reasons. Aborting.
(most times it is some scsi udeb, that fails)
Instead of trying to continue with the other udebs,
after failing the installation does stop somehow.
If I finally get all modules somehow, things are still
not OK: a simple 'ps ax' on vt2 gives me:
PID Uid VmSize Stat Command
Killed
Not enough memory? Of course, at this point I could have
setup swap, because I already have a swap partition, but
the installer itself did not give me the possibility.
Final remark:
It seems to me, that the lowmem install has room for
improvement. lowmem install is a very important thing to
have for users in the "developing world", for embedded
systems, and for nostalgic geeks. If d-i is just not the
right tool for lowmem installation, it would be nice to
have miniconda (mini-Anaconda) support Debian. According to
http://www.rule-project.org/en/sw/miniconda.php, "Miniconda
will install in as little as 12 MB of RAM. Michael Fratoni
managed to force an install in 8 MB, but the results are not
consistant..."
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