Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 04:10:22 -0800 (PST) From: Paul Apple <paula@jeffnet.org> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: HERBELOT Thierry <Thierry.Herbelot@alcatel.fr>, Walter Collins <wcollins@best.com>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Minimum System Requirements? Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.10.9903052254140.390-100000@ellie.my.domain> In-Reply-To: <19990306132018.Q490@lemis.com>
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On Sat, 6 Mar 1999, Greg Lehey wrote: > On Friday, 5 March 1999 at 15:07:46 -0800, Paul Apple wrote: > > On Fri, 5 Mar 1999, HERBELOT Thierry wrote: > >> Walter Collins wrote: > >>> > >>> What are the minimum system requirements for FreeBSD. I was trying to setup > >>> a friend with a UNIX learning machine (single user 386) and the installation > >>> would bomb, hang and so on. (200 mg unallocated drive space) > >> > >> It seems you have to have more than 8 Megs of RAM to install 3.1 > > > > According to the INSTALL.TXT file on the distribution cdrom (disk 1) > > only 5 megabytes of RAM are required to install and 4 megabytes to run. > > Has this changed? > > We're not sure. We've seen a number of reports that you need more > than 8 MB. It's not intended to be like that, and we're > investigating, but since hardly anybody uses such small memory sizes, > it's possible that a problem has crept in. We're pretty sure that you > can still install 2.2.8 in 5 MB. > > Greg > -- Count me as a hardly anybody. Ya make do with whatcha got when ya ain't got alot and my bitty box is a 486 with 8 megs. AFAIK that's the maximum the motherboard can take. (Texas Instruments, model unknown, no docs.) CPU: Cyrix 486SLC/DLC (486-class CPU) Origin = "CyrixInstead" DIR=0xff Stepping=0 Revision=0 real memory = 8650752 (8448K bytes) avail memory = 6930432 (6768K bytes) Actually, it's the same case and power supply and peripherals that formerly housed a 386 motherboard and FreeBSD 2.1.6. i plug a phone line in it anyway... Walters' problem sounds similar to mine except that I'm trying to do a sysinstall upgrade to 3.1 from 2.2.6. After distribution selection, sysinstall begins to extract into the /bin directory and dies. I can switch virtual terminals, but the holographic shell is unresponsive. Luckily, I've been able undo the upgrade. From what I've been able to discern from LAYOUT.TXT on the cdrom is that the distributions are cat'ed together and then un-tar'd to where the files belong. Just how memory intensive is that operation? The contents of the installation disks bin directory occupy 25 megabytes. While booting with the 3.1 floppies I believe I saw 2.7 megabytes free memory out of 8. The 3.1 boot didn't leave a one in /var/log/messages. It seems to me, thank you dejanews , that if sysinstall is compiled so that it will read install.cfg and if install.cfg can be crafted in such a way that the live file system cdrom is mounted then it could simply be copied onto a new installation or over a pre-existing installation. Speculative at this point, I've not yet gotten a chance to read the suspended-on-another-terminal man page for sysinstall. Also suspended, some text on the new boot blocks. (Actually, I just finished reading Robert Nordiers' January 4th notes on the boot blocks. I've got'em. Surprise!) Someone more familiar with sysinstall could probably knockout a script that substitutes the live file system for the distribution tar ball with relative ease. Well, faster than I could. hope that helps To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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