CentOS - Jun 2016 - Minimum RAM requirement for CentOS 6.x graphic installer?

On Thu, 2 Jun 2016 06:36:51 +0200 Nicolas Kovacs wrote:
> The title says it all. What's the minimum RAM requirement for the
CentOS
> 6.x graphic installer? In our public libraries we have some old hardware
> running CentOS 5, and I wonder if some of these machines can be upgraded
> to CentOS 6. Unfortunately RHEL 5.x' nifty text mode installer got
> seriously crippled with version 6.x.
I think that if you feed the install a kickstart file, it will install in
accordance with what you told it, but that does mean you have to spend some time
figuring out what to put in your kickstart first.  This would also give you some
consistency between systems.

Or you could let the 6.x "text installer" install it's minimal
system, and then comeback and yum install everything else afterwards.  fewer
choices to make, but you get to live with RH's ideas of sane partition
sizes.

Another option for installing on smaller machines is to use the live disk[1] and
a few tweaks[2] to do the install.  However it will mean some hand holding on
each machine to make it work, but I have done it and been reasonably happy with
the resulting system.  Note on a really small system (512MB or smaller), the use
of zram (with the normal centos kernel, and swappiness~99), or zswap (with the
elrepo kernel-ml) will make the system operate a lot better.  It is too bad the
live disks to not enable zram while booting when they don't find a linux
swap part.

[1] Have not seen the 6.8 live disk announce yet,
https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2015-August/021304.html
[2] "HOWTO install CentOS 6 on low memory computer or virtual machine (even
192MB RAM)"
     https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2011-July/115367.html


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