Re: installation trouble: RAM and swap?
> I have been having problems installing debian on my laptop.
> It's a compaq 486 with 4 MB of RAM.
> root. However, the system runs VERY slowly and often prints the message
> "fork: try again." An adduser command causes the machine to sit for
> at least ten minutes with no obvious result.
The fork error is because you're running out of ram and fork can't allocate
more ram for another process.
> suggested the problem may be caused by ``shadow ROM'' taking up my
> RAM. I tried putting device:himemsys /shadowrom:off in my DOS config.sys
> file and booting that before installing Debian, but that didn't seem to
> help.
Shadow ram exists between 640k and 1024k. On all of the desk-tops I've seen,
there are options to configure shadow ram settings in the built-in setup.
Shadow ram is a section of memory used up for copying slow ROM into much
faster ram. For DOS, this makes things go much faster, since DOS uses lots
of ROM calls. Linux doesn't use these ROM calls, so it doesn't offer any
improvement in speed, and just uses up memory.
Back to the point. How do you change what is used for shadow ram? When
you boot up, look for a message on the screen (right after the machine does
memory checks) that says something like:
Press <this-key> to enter Setup.
Press that key. It's usually the delete key, or F1. If you don't see the
message, try those keys anyway. You'll now get a menu that is bios dependent.
Usually, a brief set of instructions will be given at the bottom or at the
right hand side of the screen. Look through the various pages of options for
something that looks like:
C000-C400 Shadow
C400-C800 None
etc.... down to FFFF
Change all of these options to 'off' or 'none'. This will make DOS run slower
(unless you use something like qemm's option to load all the bios into ram,
independent of the settings in bios).
At most, this will clean up 384k of ram. I don't know if that is enough to
fix your out of memory problems.
--
- John Larkin
- jlarkin@hmc.edu
- http://aij.st.hmc.edu/~jlarkin
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