booting with 32MB RAM on a 486

jakd · Guest

first~ wow, this is an excellent project. i'm impressed as it's exactly what i was looking for in linux. great work.

i would like to install under a system with minimal resources, namely 32mb RAM, 486, 32MB flash disk (i can increase this if neccessary). unfortunately, i cannot increase the amount of RAM available (this is an embedded project).

upon boot of the 16MB ISO, i get a kernel panic (out of memory) after USB is detected. any ideas?

i'm targeting the prometheus board from http://diamondsystems.com.

thanks!
tag,jakd

taskara · Posted: Tue Apr 16, 2002 11:30 pm Post subject:

hey,
taken frmo the official gentoo install guide

"To install from the build CD, you will need to have a 486+ processor and ideally at least 64 Megabytes of RAM. (Gentoo linux has been successfully built with 64MB of RAM + 64MB of swap space, but the build process is awfully slow under those conditions.)"

so maybe 32Mb is just not quite enough

Blaze · n00b Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 24

I hope I'm not out of line for say this, but if you do a A+N install of slackware, you can get it done on a 486 with 32 megs of ram. I've done it, and have it running as my router.

Due to the slow CPU, doing a compile from scrach based distro will probably be painfully slow, what may work better is build everything on another machine, and copy it over. One thing you will need to do, is make a wrapper for uname so that it will report the system your building it on as a 486 instead of what ever it really is, if you check the linux from scrach site, I think they may have what your looking for.

Nitro · Posted: Tue Apr 16, 2002 11:38 pm Post subject:

jakd · Guest

jakd · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2002 Posts: 1

i tried a few settings altering ramdisk_size, but nothing seems to work reliably. i either hang or panic right before gentoo is ready to ask you for the keymap.

is there a way to disable usb and other device drivers through kernel parameters? that might lessen the amount of memory needed.

thanks,jakd

Ozymandias · Posted: Wed Apr 17, 2002 2:17 pm Post subject:

just my two cents:

don t install gentoo

that is right, gentoo is not the distro you want to use like this, how will you compile on that less space?
Whell, anyway, what you should do: intall gentoo on a different system with only the bare minimum you want on your embedded compu, make sure you target the compiler for your little platform. Then afterward you simply copy the files to the embedded thingy.
I would suggest using tar -p to preserver permissions together with netcat and the slackware bootdisks or something like that. Or just really forget about gentoo and use slackware with a + n like suggested.

greetz Ozy