"Jan Albrecht" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > after my debian is working without problems on my firewall for a few months, > I have two more or less simple questions: > > #1 > While updating or installing a package the computer needs a lot of > time. For example updating 2 packages took about 45 minutes. Okay, > the computer is only a P133 with 16 MB RAM, but is this a normal > behaviour? RPM never took so long to install. Is there any way to > speed up this process or just the normal way?
My firewall machine seems to do okay with APT and installing packages; it's a P100 with 56 MB of RAM (recognized, there should be 64 MB but I never bothered to find out where the last 8 MB went). It's probably the lack of memory that's hurting you. Can you find some cheap/free used 72-pin SIMMs for the machine? > #2 > Is it possible to install a new kernel with "apt-get upgrade"? Or is > the only way to upgrade the kernel to recompile a new one with the > dpkg options? No, and no. Generally new versions of the Linux kernel come in differently-named packages. So 'apt-get upgrade' will see that there's not a newer kernel-image-2.4.18-386 and not upgrade anything, even if there is kernel-image-2.4.23-386 available. I'd normally recommend using 'aptitude' to look through the package list ('/ kernel-image', then '\' until you find one that looks good, then '+' and 'g' to install it). On a machine that limited, you might want to search for packages on a separate machine, or use the lower-level command-line APT tools. You can also compile a kernel on a separate machine, and it will generally work fine. I also do this with my firewall machine, since I'd prefer the kernel compile to take less than a week. :-) -- David Maze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/ "Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal." -- Abra Mitchell -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]