Hello,
I work a lot with machines with limited amount of RAM, like:
http://www.genesippc.com/openclient.php , but also many old PC's, which
are still suitable for running xfce, Opera, vnc and rdesktop.
Installation on these machines is getting more and more difficult due to
RAM requirements of the installer (especially the package manager).
Right now the only way to install openSUSE on such a machine is to
enable a swap partition at the beginning of installation. Here comes a
catch: one can not enable a swap partition, when a HDD is not yet
partitioned, or partitioned for Windows, so the disk has to be
partitioned manually with fdisk or parted before the installation can begin.
I wonder, if support for swap file could be added to LinuxRC, so these
machines could be installed a lot more easy. There are many ways
implementing it. For 2-3 installations even an USB key would do the job
(yes, I know that they don't like many write operations, but one does
not install machines so often :-) ), or any existing ext2/reiserfs/FAT
partition, which Linux can write. One could use a 'swfilepart=/dev/sdb1'
parameter to choose a device and then create a big enough
'suseinstallswap' file, which can be deleted at the end. 'big enough' is
about 350MB for factory / ftp installation source. Then mkswap, swapon
could be ran on it, and installation of these low RAM machines could be
done just as any other openSUSE install.
This is of course only for 'advanced' users, who know what they do, just
as installing from a partition, where the user needs to take care, that
the installation source is not formatted during installation :-)
Bye,
CzP
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