8meg ram on old laptop?

Forum: Laptops
Topic: 8meg ram on old laptop?
started by: gcsnb

Posted by gcsnb on July 15 2005,16:46

I have an old 486 laptop with only a floppy and net card,
i have run the net install and it works as far as downloading the iso and creating the bootfloppy.
the laptop reboots, and it appears as though there is not enough memory to extract the knoppix image into memory.
Is is possible to specify a swap space during the install and run this on 8 meg of ram?
please say yes
Regards
Gordon

Posted by cbagger01 on July 15 2005,22:10

It might be possible to choke the initial ramdisk or adjust DSL so that it mounts a hard drive partition instead of a ramdisk upon bootup.

Unfortunately, you probably need to perform the hd install before you can tweak with it (assumes that you know what you are doing).

so unless you can temporarily move your hard disk over to another computer or temporarily install additional RAM, it may not be possible to get it to work with 8MB of RAM.

Realistically, you would not be able to use graphical mode with only 8MB of RAM.

A better choice might be "Basic Linux" or "Deli Linux" instead of DSL.

Posted by SaidinUnleashed on July 16 2005,00:47

I have made a custom build of Basic Linux 3, adding several scripts to make things easier, making the menus more intuitive, and adding an irc client.

It is available < HERE > and the md5sum is < md5 here >.

-J.P.

P.S. BL3 can run X with as little as 6mb of ram, but 8 is recommended. It works very well on my 486 lappy, which has the same specs as yours. Even the pcmcia slots work (in the menu Control Panel >> enable pcmcia) to use with an old modem I have.

Posted by gcsnb on July 17 2005,19:51

Thanks, I will take a look at basic linux as well as try to source some additional ram