Help with OS upgrades on low-memory machines

by Brett L. Moo » Wed, 23 Oct 2002 10:12:26

I have a couple of old machines that still have some life in them.
These machines are running RH 7.1 and I would like to bring them to
7.3 My usual technique is to use a boot floppy to upgrade from an ftp
site. However, the RH 7.3 requires more than the 16MB of RAM in these
machines.

What is the best way to perform the upgrade? I am looking into apt,
but I am falling into rpm dependency hell!

Thanks,
Brett

Top

1. Trouble installing RH7.1 on a low-memory machine

A followup to my earlier question - the problems I had with the RH7.1
installer not reading certain RPMs off my CD seem to have cleared up.

(To recap: I have a Gateway P-166Mhz 32M machine with a 10G drive currently
containing RH Linux 6.2. I am trying to upgrade it to 7.1)

I have selected the "upgrade" option for the RedHat install program and
selected nearly all the packages to be included. The installation goes
along fine for about an hour, then things get slower and slower (the hard
drive seems to thrash more and more), and finally I get a "Installation
aborted abnormally" message. Switching to the Debug virtual terminal
(Ctrl-Alt-4), the last line I see is "Out of memory".

Is 32M not enough? The line right BEFORE the "out of memory" one on the
Debug screen says "Adding swap partition: 96468K" so I'm assuming Linux is
trying to also use my 92M swap partition. Is that not enough?

I tried starting the installation with the option "linux mem=32M" at the
"boot:" prompt, but that didn't seem to help.

Does anyone have any other ideas how I might go about upgrading this system
with my limited RAM?

Thanks to anyone who can help.

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