[ale] 486/8 meg memory as a gateway?

[Wandered Inn]

Dan Newcombe wrote:

> As to the original question, you may have a problem installing depending
> on what hardware it has. 

Well it's done, but it was fun.

I started off with SuSE 6.4.  Got to the install screen, and it
immediately told me to go to another virtual console, create some swap
and enable it.  I did so, went through just about the whole install
process and got to a point where it threw up a generic, 'something
broke' error.  I did tried it twice with the same outcome.

I then attempted Corel Linux as I had a cdrom that came with a mag I
picked up a while back.  A pretty window popped up saying it was
attempting to install, after 8 hours I killed it.

Next, I tried TurboLinux, but no luck.

Then I went to Slackware.  I could get it to boot with the bare.i disk,
but couldn't get fdisk to return successfully when I had to set up the
partitions.  The Slackware docs said that it would be difficult to do an
install with under 16 meg, but that the lowmem.i boot disk was designed
for just such a situation.   I tried lowmem.i but it wouldn't even boot
with that.

Then I got a wierd idea.  Since SuSE would get me as far as enabling
some swap, I thought I'd create the swap that way and then do a
Slackware install.  So, I booted to the SuSE install, created the swap
partition, stuck the Slackware disk in, got to a root prompt, enabled
the swap and then was able to do a successful Slackware install (kernel
2.2.16).


--
Until later: Geoffrey		esoteric at denali.atlnet.com

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds.
The
latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to
hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his
intelligence."
- Albert Einstein
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