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
