Hello, I have an old laptop, a Compaq Armada 1580DMT, with 16M RAM, 2GB hd, floppy and CD-rom. It doesn't have built in networking, neither wired nor wireless. It does have PC card slots. It has had FreeBSD 4.9-release installed a long time, and was recently upgraded to 4.11-release from CD, sucessfully. However, I would like better pccard support, ie. 32 bit cardbus and wireless network cards, so I would like to install 6.1-release (or -stable) on it. However, when I try the 6.1-release CD (CD1), it boots as far as loading the kernel, botting the kernel, and then reboots again?? I have also tried 6.0-release, and 7.0-current (both July 06 and Aug 06 snapshots) with the same results. Are 16 Megs of RAM to little to install FreeBSD 6.0 or newer? -- Regards, Torfinn Ingolfsen, Norway
On 8/26/06, Torfinn Ingolfsen <torfinn.ingolfsen@broadpark.no> wrote:> Hello, > > I have an old laptop, a Compaq Armada 1580DMT, with 16M RAM, 2GB hd, > floppy and CD-rom. It doesn't have built in networking, neither wired > nor wireless. It does have PC card slots. It has had FreeBSD 4.9-release > installed a long time, and was recently upgraded to 4.11-release from > CD, sucessfully. > > However, I would like better pccard support, ie. 32 bit cardbus and > wireless network cards, so I would like to install 6.1-release (or > -stable) on it.How do you know it has CardBus / PCMCIA 2.1 / JEIDA 4.2? have you checked? This standard was introduced in 1995.> However, when I try the 6.1-release CD (CD1), it boots as far as > loading the kernel, botting the kernel, and then reboots again?? > > I have also tried 6.0-release, and 7.0-current (both July 06 and Aug 06 > snapshots) with the same results. > > Are 16 Megs of RAM to little to install FreeBSD 6.0 or newer?Yep. Try DragonFly BSD, it's based on FreeBSD 4.x code so it should be able to cope with an antique such as this. NetBSD would also be a good choice. I would say at least 32MB for FreeBSD 6.x... my FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE kernel is using 52MB (I think I have debugging enabled though). -- BSD Podcasts @: http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/ http://freebsdforall.blogspot.com/
Torfinn Ingolfsen wrote:> Hello, > > I have an old laptop, a Compaq Armada 1580DMT, with 16M RAM, 2GB hd, > floppy and CD-rom. It doesn't have built in networking, neither wired > nor wireless. It does have PC card slots. It has had FreeBSD > 4.9-release installed a long time, and was recently upgraded to > 4.11-release from CD, sucessfully. > > However, I would like better pccard support, ie. 32 bit cardbus and > wireless network cards, so I would like to install 6.1-release (or > -stable) on it. However, when I try the 6.1-release CD (CD1), it > boots as far as loading the kernel, botting the kernel, and then > reboots again??Try turning off all power management and plug-and-play support in the BIOS and booting FreeBSD without ACPI. Try combinations of these three things. Often older hardware has really broken APM/ACPI support that makes FreeBSD do odd things. Failing that, you may need to build a custom kernel with just the minimum required to get yourself to a shell prompt. You can build a new kernel with cardbus, usb and other extras after you get FreeBSD installed. -- Darren Pilgrim
On Sun, 2006-Aug-27 03:46:52 +0200, Torfinn Ingolfsen wrote:>I have an old laptop, a Compaq Armada 1580DMT, with 16M RAM, 2GB hd,...>However, when I try the 6.1-release CD (CD1), it boots as far as >loading the kernel, botting the kernel, and then reboots again??The CD-ROMs create a RAMdisk and need a minimum of 24MB last I checked. Once you have FreeBSD installed, it will limp along in 16MB (though not very happily). I strongly suggest you find a SODIMM to expand it. -- Peter Jeremy -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 187 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/attachments/20060827/e6251a02/attachment.pgp
Torfinn Ingolfsen <torfinn.ingolfsen@broadpark.no> wrote:> I have an old laptop, a Compaq Armada 1580DMT, with 16M RAM, 2GB hd, > floppy and CD-rom. It doesn't have built in networking, neither wired > nor wireless. It does have PC card slots. It has had FreeBSD 4.9-release > installed a long time, and was recently upgraded to 4.11-release from > CD, sucessfully.> However, when I try the 6.1-release CD (CD1), it boots as far as > loading the kernel, botting the kernel, and then reboots again??> Are 16 Megs of RAM to little to install FreeBSD 6.0 or newer?With the default configuration yes. I recently tried to install FreeBSD 6.1-PRERELEASE on a Pentium 90 with 16 MB RAM, and hit the rebooting problem as well. I moved the harddisk into a more powerful machine, installed FreeBSD there, build a lighter kernel and put the disk back. NFS mounting needed a work around: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/94830 but the rest worked out of the box. In your case it's probably easier to create a disk image in Qemu, copy it to a CD and then use something that boots from a floppy, supports the CD-Rom drive and brings dd with it, to "install" the image. Depending on your partition layout you may even be able to use your old FreeBSD installation to do that. (I'm not sure if it's possible to use FreeBSD to overwrite the partition it's running from). Fabian -- http://www.fabiankeil.de/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 187 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/attachments/20060827/d1fc0ba6/signature.pgp
Torfinn Ingolfsen wrote:
> Are 16 Megs of RAM to little to install FreeBSD 6.0 or newer?
As others have pointed out, installation via sysinstall
requires at least 24 MB of RAM. So you either have to
prepare your own installation media, or put the harddisk
in a different PC, install FreeBSD there, and move the
disk back.
In any case you should carefully tune your kernel confi-
guration to only include those things that you really need.
There are also options to exclude certain parts, e.g. the
syscons driver has seveal options to exclude copy&paste,
font loading and other things, which can save some space.
Don't forget to configure plenty of swap space; you'll
probably need it. And have a look at the tuning(7) man
page which has several hints that may help for low-memory
situations.
If you want to run X11 (a current version of Xorg), you
absolutely must upgrade the RAM. You won't be happy with
16 MB only. But even with more RAM, running X11 won't be
much fun, because the CPU isn't very fast, I guess.
If you want to run a light-weight graphical web browser,
I recommend links (in X11 graphics mode, option "-g") or
dillo. Both are available from the ports collection.
They support only limited JavaScript, though, and no
Flash, Java or anything more advanced.
Best regards
Oliver
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