On Thu, Jul 13, 2000 at 05:21:03PM +0930, Mark Phillips wrote: > My brother is trying to upgrade debian from slink to potato on his > 8Meg RAM machine. He has about 20Meg swap as well. Dselect is very > very slow --- lots of swapping. And try to install stuff, and it > bombs out with not enough memory! Hi Mark, I have a similar machine and guessed that this would be a problem. Although I am going to leave mine with slink, I briefly toyed with the following idea: The problem is the huge package lists that are used for the dependency checkings. Obviously, with these lowend machines, you probably won't be installing all the gnome libs and a lot of other stuff. So why not remove anything that depends on say xlib, or has doc in it ... from the package lists? Hopefully, you may be able to chop out 50% or so from the total number of packages. This should at least speed things up considerably. Unfortunately before I got around to making a full blown filter that would be able to chop based on selectable criteria, I decided I wanted to use the machine as an X terminal, so I didn't continue and am staying slink (X -query works amazingly well). The attached script is embryo form only - knocks out dependers on xlib. The second thing to do would be perhaps to clean the cruft out of the status file. To use the script: 1. Remove X if installed. 2. apt-get update 3. cat /var/state/apt/lists/xx_Packages | chunder.pl > Packages.short 4. dpkg --update-avail Packages.short 5. copy Packages.short back to /var/state/apt/lists/xx_Packages 6. apt-cache gencaches 7. apt-get dist-upgrade Disclaimers: 1. of course you will end up with a scrogged system, that is the whole point 2. it is a while since i used this (and _only_ on slink so pls read the man pages - my memory may have slipped up) 3. backup, only try if you know what you are doing, not my fault etc. HTH, mark.
Attachment:
chunder.pl
Description: Perl program