Bug#472487: installationreport: low memory install lenny beta1: Problems
> Comments/Problems:
> 1. when trying to start graphical installer on a low memory system,
> fallback to text-based installer does not work, system hangs for
> ever.
With 32MB internal memory, you're basically asking your system to do
something impossible: load an initrd that's almost the size of your memory
after a kernel has already been loaded.
Here are the _uncompressed_ sizes of the regular and graphical initrds:
-rw-r--r-- 1 fjp fjp 27515392 2008-03-31 10:58 initrd_gtk
-rw-r--r-- 1 fjp fjp 11127808 2008-03-31 10:59 initrd_newt
I suspect that the system is just running out of memory while loading the
initrd or very shortly after, with the kernel having insufficient memory
available even to handle the error.
If this is an issue, it's something in the kernel upstream as that is the
only thing that could detect the problem in a timely fashion and warn about
it. I'm not going to file a BR about it though.
Documentation seems the best solution here.
> 2. cdrom drive (and harddisk) were not detected in step "detecting
> cd-rom drive". There were no ide related modules loaded
> automatically in this step, only usb-storage was loaded. When I
> loaded ide_generic by hand on the second console, it worked, cdrom
> drive and hard disk were detected.
Please try booting Beta1 with 'hw-detect/load-ide=true'. Does that help?
Also, please provide the output of 'lspci -nn' and 'lsmod'.
If the above helps, then the last both for a boot with and without that
parameter.
> 3. when it comes to partitioning the disk, I thought I could try the
> guided partitioner. So I went back to "Load installer components
> from CD", chose "partman-auto", again to partitioning disk, chose
> "guided partitioning" -> use whole disk -> separate home-partition.
> partman then presented me a partition table with two ext3 partitions
> and one swap! Creating ext3 partitions on a low memory system
> is not recommended, so automatic partitioner should not choose
> ext3 as default in low memory installs.
That's a won't fix. If you choose guided partitioning, you get its defaults,
and those are not tuned for lowmem. You can either change the file system
type before committing the changes, or not use guided partitioning.
> 5. booting the new system didn't work:
> ALERT! /dev/hda1 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!
That could be ide-generic again. Try booting in rescue mode, mount the
target system, add ide-generic to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules, update the
initramfs and reboot.
Cheers,
FJP
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