> Some (many/all?) modern Linux distributions really want more than 4MB
> of RAM to do an install. But there may be some that will install on less.
> Back when I first started I installed Slackware 2.1 (1.1.59 kernel) on
> a 386 with 4MB RAM and it had no trouble at all.
My first machine running Linux was a 386sx with 4 megs of RAM. It did
run rather comfortably (doing mostly text, nearly no X) in that space,
including uucp & cnews, although I did later upgrade to 8.
As far as I know, the biggest hurdle to getting these distributions loaded
onto a limited-RAM machine is that the distributions usually make up
at least a floppy's worth of data (1.44 megs) into a RAM disk, and
suddenly you're without that RAM for other purposes. Early versions of
Red Hat required _two_ ramdisks, and as such would not load on machines
with less than 8 megs of RAM. There just wasn't enough room for the
install scripts, perl, ram disks, and other required pieces.
The first thing to try is to see if you can disable the ramdisk when
installing. Some (e.g., slackware) will allow you do to that if you boot
up saying something like "linux floppy", or "linux root=/dev/fd0".
Another thing to do very early on is to set up and enable ample swapping
space.
> cause the system really wants more than 4mb, so it'll be doing a lot
> of paging (at least mine did, and kernels are bigger now than then).
No doubt about that. I think we were somewhere around 0.99pl something or
other when I was running it on that 386sx.
> Fred
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David E. Fox Tax Thanks for letting me
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