On Sat, 21 Dec 1996, Adam Wiggins wrote: > Hey there folks. New (potential) Linux user here; having trouble getting > Debian to install on my dinosaur system, and haven't been able to locate > anything in the troubleshooting guides or user docs to help out. > Upon booting from the Rescue floppy, everything works fine for a while > (lots of failed to locate cdrom messages and such) until it gets to: > > Partition check: > hda: hda1 > RAMDisk: Compressed image found at block 0 > Couldn't get a free page... > out of memoryVFS: Mounted root (minix filesystem) > init: cache '/etc/ld.so.cache' is corrupt > > At which point it goes no further. The machine is a 486-33 (intel) with > 120meg IDE drive (currently formated for dos 5.0), SVGA, a few other > random periphrials. The boot disk is a 3 1/2 floppy and I've tried making > several just in case it was a data error of some sort. My first guess is > that it's trying to make a RAM disk and then running out of memory in my > paltry 4 megs of ram; however I was unable to locate any boot options for > disabling this, and I have no idea if that's really it being that I know > next to nothing about Linux. It is version 2.0.27 of Debian. Any > thoughts or perhaps pointers to documentation which adresses this > appreciated. >
Adam, I don't know how much help this will be but since I didn't see any replys to your message, here goes... Back a while ago, I loaded Debian 1.1 on an aging 386 with with 4 Meg of RAM (seems like ages ago, but it was less than 6 months...), and one of the first things I had to do was configure a swap partition. If I remember correctly, after loading the boot and root disks (I know the procedure is different now, I think the rescue disk is all you need), and before I got the nice menu screen, there was a plain terminal-like screen about creating and initializing a swap partition. My memory of this is sort of vague, but essentially it allowed me to use fdisk (or cfdisk, I'm not sure) to partition my hard drive and create a swap partition and activate it, all before actually starting the real install program. I think the way the screen was worded, made it sound sort of 'optional' but on a 4 Meg system it is REQUIRED. Hopefully, Bruce has gotten back to you outside of the list. I know he has done quite a bit with 'low memory' systems. If however you are getting this all before you have the oportunity to create a swap partition you may have another problem where your system doesn't get to see all 4 Meg of memory. I remember seeing something on this list recently about some systems that were configured with 'Shadow RAM' enabled having problems. Check out: ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/Debian-1.2/disks-i386/current/install.html (The current Debian 1.2 installation instructions, 2.0.27 is the Linux kernal version) There is a section under 'Configuring Your System' about Shadow RAM. Hope this helps, - Don ----- Don Prezioso Ashland University Phone: (419) 289-5015 System Programmer/Analyst 401 College Avenue E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Administrative Computing Ashland, OH 44805 http://www.ashland.edu/~dprez -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
