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#26 2008-09-25 19:29:59

rocktorrentz
Member
From: Southampton, England
Registered: 2007-08-05
Posts: 141

Re: lowmem boot image

Bump again tongue Trying to install on an old box with 64mb ram to give away. If this isn't fixed i'll have to use ubuntu lite sad

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#27 2008-10-24 23:39:37

jjjacer
Member
Registered: 2007-02-11
Posts: 7

Re: lowmem boot image

ok i had to reply to this as it may help people to install the latest Archlinux on an older laptop with little ram. Now as proof of this i am currently posting this from a gateway solo laptop with 64mb ram/59 after video and a 400mhz celeron cpu and 5gb hard disk. It did take some work to install but it is possible.

First of all this takes some work to do and is not for the faint of heart.

Boot into the arch live install cd as normal

go through the standard setup features like normal, but instead of just having a root and swap partition, make a 500mb temp partition. now once the partitions are created and formated exit the installer.

now mount your root partition to /mnt, your temp partition to /tmp and swapon your swap partition ex.

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt -t xfs
mount /dev/sda2 /tmp -t xfs
swapon /dev/sda3

now your partition is ready for files, and there is two things you can do here, you can use the ncurses based installer, and select packages and install or you can use the CLI version also found in the /arch folder. now all the packages should install good. when you get to the option to edit grub or lilo remember root is /dev/sda not /dev/hda like it is by default (at least for me). now your archlinux system should be bootable.

before you reboot please modify fstab as it does not have the mount points setup yet because you basically skipped mount point creation in setup, so what do you do. well just add these lines in fstab (depends on your setup and what filesystem your useing, i use xfs)

/dev/sda1                   /               xfs rw
/dev/sda2                   /tmp         xfs rw   # you basically can mount this anywhere as we no longer need it but i use /tmp just because
/dev/sda3                   swap        swap

now your system should be ready to go, but how do i use this newly created system with new apps.

well you will now need to get some apps but because of low memory here are some suggestions.

yes you can run X but if you want a desktop LXDE might be the only good one/if you dont care about a windows like desktop just use openbox

web browser, i am useing the latest version of Opera and it works great but can get a little slow on big sites. If you need java/flash and can handle waiting a bit for things to load doto slow cpu use Opera/Seamonkey, if your just reading bbs and checking a few things go Dillo.

Abiword is a good office app but if you can go Siag as abiword is slow to start and uses alot of cpu.

other than all that you should be good to go, btw if anyone has any low mem tweaks please, add as id like to know

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#28 2008-11-29 23:35:24

cheese
Member
Registered: 2008-11-29
Posts: 2

Re: lowmem boot image

@jjjacer: that totally worked, thanks alot man! I think the devs should really change the structure of the archlive install to support lower memory systems, as Arch is an awesome distribution to use for low-end systems.

Once again, thanks for taking the time to post this method!

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#29 2008-11-30 11:13:55

rocktorrentz
Member
From: Southampton, England
Registered: 2007-08-05
Posts: 141

Re: lowmem boot image

The 2008.10 image has a lowmem option again. Don't know if that means the above method is unnecessary.

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#30 2008-12-01 23:22:05

toofishes
Developer
From: Chicago, IL
Registered: 2006-06-06
Posts: 602
Website

Re: lowmem boot image

We should have a new ISO out very soon, but until then, you can grab the latest version of 'setup' and couple it with the 2008.06 ISO (the archiso-based one, not the archboot-based one):
http://projects.archlinux.org/?p=instal … up;hb=HEAD

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#31 2009-11-28 15:22:38

tyakugan
Member
Registered: 2009-11-28
Posts: 2

Re: lowmem boot image

For all other people, brought here by a search engine:

archlinux-2009.08-core-i686.iso works out of the box on my Dell Latitude L400 (with 128MB RAM).

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#32 2009-11-28 15:57:05

Misfit138
Misfit Emeritus
From: USA
Registered: 2006-11-27
Posts: 4,189

Re: lowmem boot image

tyakugan wrote:

For all other people, brought here by a search engine:

archlinux-2009.08-core-i686.iso works out of the box on my Dell Latitude L400 (with 128MB RAM).

Are you able to verify if the netinstall works with 128mb ram..or less?

Testers needed.

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#33 2010-06-27 23:28:57

solarwind
Member
From: Toronto
Registered: 2008-03-18
Posts: 546

Re: lowmem boot image

I remember using an old installer (don't remember when) that installed fine on 64 MB RAM. Does anyone know which version of installer that was?

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#34 2010-06-28 00:05:59

solarwind
Member
From: Toronto
Registered: 2008-03-18
Posts: 546

Re: lowmem boot image

Just downloaded the 2008.06 ftp iso. It's installing right now on my old laptop (64 MB RAM).

http://mirrors.kernel.org/archlinux/iso/

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