On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 2:00 PM, Darac Marjal <mailingl...@darac.org.uk> wrote: > On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 09:17:11AM +0300, Aleksandar Kostadinov wrote: >> Hello, >> >> trying to make a print server from an old pentium 100 64M RAM. I had >> to take that route because the USB<->parallel cables I've got don't >> work. Anyways, first tried to install debian stable but it crashes on >> boot. Something with the IDE controllers. btw I think there are some >> nasty bugs with stable kernel because it crashes on a Intel core duo >> laptop for other reasons. Anyways newer and older kernels work just >> fine on these machines. So I went ahead and installed wheezy on the >> machine (had to remove the vga=788 and quiet options, otherwise I >> can't see the installer). >> >> Now the problem is that I can't install anything more on that machine >> because apt-get update takes forever. It downloads package index from >> the mirror but "reading package lists" step is so slow I'm not sure it >> will ever complete. First 11% complete in a reasonable time but then >> it seems it becomes slower as work progresses. > > Looking at the amount of RAM you have, I suspect that what's happening > is that the first 11% of the work is able to fit into RAM, but then your > system starts swapping. As far as I'm aware, Debian should run in 64M > RAM, but it WILL need to swap a lot. I'm not entirely sure there's > anything you can do about that except be patient.
Excuse me, that can't be serious. Not really usable to wait a week for it to complete (if it ever does). All benefits using debian are lost if apt unusable. I'm sure there must be at least a few ways to workaround the situation. I've a 4G HDD in the machine besides the boot drive of 1.2G so perhaps create a local proxy/mirror on it with a small subset of the packages? Any ideas how to do so without the need of another machine to serve as the proxy/mirror? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CAH9M6rLEner4nkCmoCTHU64uMFfjKpOAg+FCxunrs=gszau...@mail.gmail.com