said Geordie Birch (on 2001-06-07), > said Kenneth Pronovici (on 2001-06-07), > > > 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? > > you can easily do it with debian 2.1. you could then do an apt-get > dist-upgrade to run debian 2.2. > > i have a 486 laptop with 4MB RAM and 125MB HDD. average free disk space > is around 10MB! > > it swaps a lot but otherwise works fine.
i should add that i have not dist-upgraded that box to 2.2. ge. -- "The number of Unix installations is now six, with more expected."