I shot my self in the foot....again. I'm bringing up Suse 8 with the default installion. The manuals kept referring to installing with a minimum of 256 MB or 560 MBs. But now that I had a system up, I started bring down the size to see how small it can be and still run.
In all cases, I was running without a swap file. I could boot the system at 16 MBs and it would come up fine (12 MBs wouldn't boot). So I logged on and tried some commands. "top" worked fine "man top" worked fine "man rpm" failed It seems that the first time you issue a "man" for a particular topic, extra work, is done and is saved. Subsequent executions, even after an IPL, don't experience the "great" use of CPU that is done initially. However, in 16 MB, "man rpm" failed. And it will now fail even with a machine size of 256MBs. Apparently, whatever was partically done with the "rpm" man pages isn't going to get redone. "man rpm" now fails consistantly. I have considered reinstalling Suse 8 and just learn not to IPL with such limited storage. I have also considered ftp'ng the man page from another Linux 8 machine. But there must be a better way. Is there a way to force the "man" command to redo the man page in question? "man man" doesn't show any syntax that may do this. Perhaps there is another command that will? Perhaps whatever process there is to build a man page would be needed to "cold start" this process. Thanks Tom Duerbusch THD Consulting