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How to resize ramdisk?



Hi,
I'd like to ask if there is a way to resize the ramdisk on a Debian live cd, either at boot time, or while running.

My problem is that I have a not very current machine with only 256 MB of memory (that seemed to be plenty when I bought it), thus the ramdisk is set to only 128 MB, and it isn't very hard to fill it up when, for instance, installing some extra packages with their dependencies (I've used a Lenny live cd a few times to try things that I don't want to install on my regular system, e.g., packages from experimental). I have however a swap partition of ~1 GB, and figured that I could dedicate part of it to the ramdisk -- the performance isn't supposedly going to be worse than that of a regular on-disk partition. So I tried booting with the "swapon" option: the swap partition is recognized and used ("free" shows it) but the ramdisk is still set to 128 MB. I'm not sure whether this should be considered a bug and I should file a report on the BTS, or it is indeed the desired behavior. Anyway, can I get the ramdisk bigger?

By the way, may I ask if you plan to resume publishing autobuilt testing and unstable live images? Trying experimental packages on a Lenny live cd has been doable while there was little difference between Lenny and Sid, but now that base packages have been upgraded (e.g., I see that Squeeze/Sid now have glibc 2.9, while Lenny has 2.7) it is going to be increasingly harder (given the limited ramdisk space, it is probably already impossible for me).

Thank you
 Gerardo


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