Booting Laptop with 8Mb of RAM

Forum: Laptops
Topic: Booting Laptop with 8Mb of RAM
started by: aliem

Posted by aliem on April 18 2005,16:55

I have a very Laptop called "Robin" with:
8Mb RAM
800Mb HD
Floppy
USB
No Ethernet

When I try to boot I get a beautiful:

mount: Out of memory
/linuxrc: Cannot fork

Is there a way to limit memory usage on boot or booting with a simple shell without mounting "knoppix/knoppix" image?

Bye

Posted by AwPhuch on April 18 2005,21:06

8Meg is much to low to try to run X, either get more ram or run as command line

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by aliem on April 18 2005,21:26

This appens when I'm booting, I think that the kernel occupies too mutch memory so te initrd can't be loaded.

What are the the sources of the kernel?
I'll try to make a small kernel suitable for my laptop.

Bye

Posted by skaos on April 19 2005,09:56

Writing "dsl 2" (without quotes) at the boot:-prompt will launch you into command line (at least is does in DSL 0.8.3).

If you want X-windows with only 8 MB, take a look at < http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/baslinux/. >

I doubt that recompiling the kernel will help much.

Posted by aliem on April 19 2005,11:54

I tryed with "dsl 2 ramdisk_size=4096" but nothing.

I was trying to boot with DSL because I want to install a real Operating System (now I Installed FreeDOS an muLinux) but there is no way to use plip or slip to transfer files between PCs.

I'll try to make my kernel ... I'll get the sources now

Bye

Posted by ChronoMS on April 24 2005,04:58

Thanks skoas!

I am trying baselinux out and so far (on paper at least) it seems very powerful for old laptops. Heck you cobble this with some built-in DSL networking and other things and you could run a lot more than what people think when they through old computers away.