On Mon, 21 May 2007, Peter Czanik wrote: > I work a lot with machines with limited amount of RAM, like: > http://www.genesippc.com/openclient.php , but also many old PC's, which > are still suitable for running xfce, Opera, vnc and rdesktop. > Installation on these machines is getting more and more difficult due to > RAM requirements of the installer (especially the package manager). > Right now the only way to install openSUSE on such a machine is to > enable a swap partition at the beginning of installation. Here comes a > catch: one can not enable a swap partition, when a HDD is not yet > partitioned, or partitioned for Windows, so the disk has to be > partitioned manually with fdisk or parted before the installation can begin. > I wonder, if support for swap file could be added to LinuxRC, so these > machines could be installed a lot more easy. There are many ways > implementing it. For 2-3 installations even an USB key would do the job > (yes, I know that they don't like many write operations, but one does > not install machines so often :-) ), or any existing ext2/reiserfs/FAT > partition, which Linux can write. One could use a 'swfilepart=/dev/sdb1' > parameter to choose a device and then create a big enough > 'suseinstallswap' file, which can be deleted at the end. 'big enough' is > about 350MB for factory / ftp installation source. Then mkswap, swapon > could be ran on it, and installation of these low RAM machines could be > done just as any other openSUSE install. > This is of course only for 'advanced' users, who know what they do, just > as installing from a partition, where the user needs to take care, that > the installation source is not formatted during installation :-)
Really cool users can show their advancedness by booting with (for example): insmod=vfat exec="mount /dev/sda1 /mnt ; dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/foo bs=1G count=1 ; mkswap /mnt/foo ; swapon /mnt/foo ; /usr/local/bin/umount -l /mnt" which does exactly what you want. :-) No idea what evil things will happen if you resize that partition in yast, though. Steffen --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
