MiniSUSE - Test openSUSE on Minimal Hardware

From openSUSE

Here are some examples of normal SUSE Linux installations on minimal hardware.

La Mouette

Sub laptop On this laptop, I could install very easily SUSE 9.1 with 48Mb ram, 10.0 with 80Mb (but not 10.1). I have now 144Mo but didn't tried again 10.1 -- Jdd sysop 06:21, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Custom Oldie 1

Basic data 128 MB RAM, 300 MHz CPU, 8 GB HD. Selected minimal installation that uses below 500 MB of hard disk.

• First try was installation of 10.0. It was OK considering speed, and failed once because "too little memory for YaST", which was solved confirming YaST proposal to activate a swap, and few times with segfault. Giving up. Version 10.0 is interesting because of YaST support for selection export and import. Second was common opinion that requirements are growing with each version.
• The same machine and selection, version 10.1 installation passed fine, with no glitch. Speed is acceptable. No complains about too little memory.

It is necessary to write test procedure, and check all that goes in minimal selection. For instance mc (Midnight Commander), installs without glitch with rpm, but with YaST triggered few dependencies, guess it is for GUI needs, that are not installed now. Got to check. --Rajko M

Custom Oldie 2

Basic data 64-128 MB RAM, 667 MHz CPU, 8-120 GB HD. Selected minimal installation that uses below 500 MB of hard disk. Requires 500 - 1000GB swap space depending on size of HD --Boyd Gerber

SuSE 10.2 (and 10.3)

Just upgraded my “old” 166Mhz, 64M Pentium, let me summarize how I got on below. One critical point, the document about installing with low memory http://en.opensuse.org/Installation_with_Little_Memory does have all the answers, however may be some one better than me could write a HOWTO. Still back to my “story”;

- Started by downloading 10.3, cut a long story short did not work. Wold not start without the '_tmpfs=0' option, and then run like a dog, an old one at that! At one point is just seemed to get stuck in a loop. After a few days gave up! - After finding the site and reading, tks, I downloaded SuSE 10.2.

    - Learning point: after burning ever CD check the media using YaST.    I had NOT burnt the CD in block mode, 
      result the system started to load, then carped out at some point a few hours later.     Wasted a day or 
      two, all for NOT following the documentation!     
    - When system started to boot from CD is asked for swap.    Manually build and added swap using parted, 
      and system started to reload
         - NOTE: later in the reload YaST tries to re-partition the disk, with an active SWAP file it 
           cannot umount the SWAP partition to rebuild, thus create the correct size (twice memory size 
           | please correct me if there is a better answer) with parted, as this will be the swap file 
           you will end up with on the finished machine.
    - Building on above, when YaST get to the point of defining partitions, you need to get it to 
      "read from disk" and that way is will pick up the current swap file and later NOT try to 
      delete/create a swap file.   Working this out took a "little" while.
         - Not sure what would have happened if I had created a swap file rather than a swap partition.    
           Still with only 64M of memory I guess you will always need an active swap file.    Sadly my old 
           PC does not have a USB otherwise I would have put the swap on that, and I "guess" made life a 
           lot simpler.

Completing the installation took a lot of restarts, and a round of getting YaST to recover the system once. Sadly was not the cleanest installation. In summary, does work however take time, think about the “swap” issues, check media and read the documents (the answers are out there).

Thanks again for the site, hope this info helps someone else, may try an upgrade to SuSE 10.3 now, but not sure I am up to it yet! - --Colleti 09:56, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

PS - Sorry for the poor formating, and could not find a way to add this to the discussion page.