Bug#319823: Bug#319878: kernel-image-2.6-686: the entire range of 2.6 debian kernels do not install on m/cs with <= 48mb RAM
Luke,
Sorry for the previous terse replies to your bug reports #319878 and #319823.
The debian-kernel team gets a lot of email/bugs and sometimes is quick to
response/close bugs without a lot of explanation.
I think what horms was trying to say was that your bug report listed 2.6.5 as
the kernel version you were reporting against and that Debian no longer
supports that kernel. Your second bug report seems to indicate that you've
tried 2.6.5-12 so that answers that question.
The debian-kernel team could use your help in tracking down the problem. Have
you google'd to see if others are having the problem and have found a solution
(maybe another distro has solved this?)? Can you try, as horms suggested, to
fix it yourself and then let the debian-kernel team know how to fix it so they
can try, if possible, to integrate the fix in the generic kernels?
I agree with your comment about 2.6 requiring a lot of memory, I guess this is
the price we pay for supporting more hardware. Maybe there's a solution that
would allow for modular ramdisks or something so that you wouldn't need so
much memory if you didn't need all the drivers? Or maybe a special low-mem
kernel maintained by the people who needed it?
I think at some point the only way of supporting such hardware will be to stay
on old releases. You might already have trouble running
dselect/apt-get/aptitude on a box with 48mb.
Of course as Jurij and Massa bluntly pointed out, the best way to get these
things fixed is to do it yourself. But you might consider the return on time
invested to fix such a problem compared to putting your time elsewhere.
I think this bug should stay open as a place for people to discuss 2.6 memory
requirements until it's either fixed, forwarded upstream, or tagged wontfix.
Thanks,
--
Matt Taggart
taggart@debian.org
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