Marvin Renich wrote: > Okay, I have finally tried the install again using the daily build from > 20041018. The short answer is that I was able to get past the point > where partman was previously failing to run due to mounted swap > partitions (which could not be turned off due to memory usage). Because > I did not want to disturb my installation on that machine, I only went > as far as using partman to associate partitions with mount points, and > then I exited without writing changes to disk. > > I tried the (partial) install twice; first without using swap at all, > then turning on swap before loading installer components from CD. Both > times I got a warning at the beginning of the install saying that a > minimum of 22MB was needed, but I continued without problems with only > 20MB. Without swap I expected to run into memory problems, but didn't. > Apparently many modules (e.g. PCMCIA) that were always loaded with the > earlier version of the installer are no longer loaded if not needed. > This is excellent; congrats to the installer team! That's news to me. I thought it always tried to start pcmcia. However, we have made some other changes for better lowmem support. I've never managed to boot a 20 mb system myself, it crashes early in the boot when it seems to use >20 mb in setting up its filesystem from the initrd: Setting up filesystem, please wait ... __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed (gfp=0x1d2/0) __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed (gfp=0x1d2/0) VM: killing process cp Killed Kernel panic: Attempted to kill init! But then I pass mem=20M to the kernel to test this on my (3 gb real ram) machine and that may not be exactly the same amount of memory that you have. So if 20 mb installs really look to work, that's excellent news and I can change the warning to be below that. Can you send me a verbatim copy of your /proc/meminfo? > In the no-swap trial, partman had no problems because the disk did not > have any active swap or mounted partitions. In the swap trial, > apparently partman still did not have any trouble, even though enough > swap was in use to prevent deactivating the swap. I would hope that > there is a check to make sure partitions that are currently in use are > not disturbed, but I didn't try it ;-). Again, kudos to the developers > responsible for partman! Yes, as far as I know all problems with partman and swap are fixed now. > I did notice one negative feature: I could choose ext2, but I could not > use my existing ext3 partitions as-is. Perhaps this was just because I > was doing a low-memory install Yep, we lack ext3 (or most other filesystem) support in lowmem mode. You can probably mount them as ext2. > Thanks to the entire debian installer team for an excellent product! > The installation process has gone from something that requires detailed > knowledge of all the hardware in your machine and much hand tweaking to > a smoothly guided step-by-step process requiring only basic computer > administration skills. This is something that you should all be proud > of, and can only help the popularity of debian. Thanks, it's good to get some encouragement occasionally. -- see shy jo
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