[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Low Memory Install?



On Thu, Jun 07, 2001 at 01:16:45PM -0500, Kenneth Pronovici wrote:
| I have a friend who's interested in getting my help to install Linux
| for the first time... but his spare machine only has 4MB of RAM.  The
| last time I tried to install Linux on a machine with that little RAM
| was in 1996 or 1997 when I was using RedHat 4.2.  RedHat's installer
| wouldn't even run properly on a machine with that little RAM, and I
| ended up falling back on an older "low memory" version of Slackware.
| 
| My question is: can I successfully complete a minimal Debian install 
| with only 4MB of RAM, or is this a losing proposition that's just going 
| to frustrate me?

I don't know for sure, but it might be difficult.  Can you take the
hard drive out of that machine and put it in a newer machine just for
the install?

Also, with only 4MB RAM you will spend a lot of time swapping when you
try and run things.


I have a 486 with 8MB RAM and it swaps quite a bit.  I couldn't do the
install directly on it because it couldn't boot from a CD, and loadlin
doesn't work after windows starts, and DOS didn't have a CD-ROM
driver.  (the cd drive was borrowed from another machine just for the
install)  I ended up taking the hd out and using a different machine
to install Debian, then moving the hd back to the 486.

-D



Reply to: