Date: Sun, 6 Dec 1998 10:44:43 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Aaron Nadeau <fallinangl@yahoo.com> Cc: FreeBSD Questions <questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Minimum requirements to install FreeBSD (was: why won't this thing work?) Message-ID: <19981206104443.A603@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <19981205212712.13697.rocketmail@send102.yahoomail.com>; from Aaron Nadeau on Sat, Dec 05, 1998 at 01:27:12PM -0800 References: <19981205212712.13697.rocketmail@send102.yahoomail.com>
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[Format autorecovered at freebie.lemis.com] On Saturday, 5 December 1998 at 13:27:12 -0800, Aaron Nadeau wrote: > ---Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote: >> On Friday, 4 December 1998 at 14:43:06 -0800, Rick Hamell wrote: >>>> hello, I am trying to install FreeBSD on two OLD 386 computers. Both >>>> of them are using Pheonix BIOS 1.10. I got them for free from my >>>> school because I can't sepn money on a new unix box. If you could >>>> help me get these things running I would really appricate it. >>> >>> It's possible that they're not fast enough to run FreeBSD... The >>> minimum recommendations are 486sx-25 or so. >> >> Where do you get this idea from? >> >>> That being said people have run 386 fine. >> >> Indeed. >> >> You should be very careful about statements you make. People could >> believe them. > > could you tell me what the bare minimum system reqs. are for running > FreeBSD? right now I am treying to install it on a 386 with 16Mbs of > RAM. I have 24Megs of hard drive space open. DOS and Win 3.x boots > just fine on this box. What happens is the kernel loads but before I > get the setup options menu, (There are three different options one of > them is CIL I think) It reboots the system and does the same thing > again. Please help if you can. Thanks Please don't send me unsolicited private messages unless you intend to pay me. You're much better off sending them to FreeBSD-questions otherwise. FreeBSD requires an absolute minimum of a 386 SX with 5 MB of memory to install. You can run with less than 5 MB, but you need that much for the installation. It's difficult to say how much disk space you need, though I'd consider 24 MB too little. I usually recommend a root partition of 30 MB, a swap partition of 128 MB and a /usr partition of ``the rest'', expected to be at least 200 MB. But I have been able to install a complete system on an 80 MB disk (on a 386SX16 with 7 MB of memory; this was some time ago). It wasn't much fun. Having said that, I'm sure that disk is not your problem. At this point the installation program is not interested in the disk. Your BIOS is probably set up incorrectly, or you have some strange hardware in your system (which you didn't bother to describe) which is causing the problem. It's dubious as to whether it's worth the trouble to debug the problem. Greg -- See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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