Re: 16M RAM enough for FreeBSD 6.1?

Torfinn Ingolfsen <torfinn.ingolfsen@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I have an old laptop, a Compaq Armada 1580DMT, with 16M RAM, 2GB hd,
floppy and CD-rom. It doesn't have built in networking, neither wired
nor wireless. It does have PC card slots. It has had FreeBSD 4.9-release
installed a long time, and was recently upgraded to 4.11-release from
CD, sucessfully.

However, when I try the 6.1-release CD (CD1), it boots as far as
loading the kernel, botting the kernel, and then reboots again??

Are 16 Megs of RAM to little to install FreeBSD 6.0 or newer?

With the default configuration yes.

I recently tried to install FreeBSD 6.1-PRERELEASE on a
Pentium 90 with 16 MB RAM, and hit the rebooting problem as well.

I moved the harddisk into a more powerful machine,
installed FreeBSD there, build a lighter kernel and
put the disk back.

NFS mounting needed a work around:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/94830
but the rest worked out of the box.

In your case it's probably easier to create a disk image
in Qemu, copy it to a CD and then use something that
boots from a floppy, supports the CD-Rom drive and brings
dd with it, to "install" the image.

Depending on your partition layout you may even
be able to use your old FreeBSD installation to do that.
(I'm not sure if it's possible to use FreeBSD to overwrite
the partition it's running from).

Fabian
--
http://www.fabiankeil.de/

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