[Rule-list] 486 laptop success (Long)

[Michael Fratoni]

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Well, it's possible to install Red Hat linux on a 486 laptop with 8M of 
RAM and an 80M hard drive. It isn't fun, and it isn't something I'd want 
to do again, unless I was being paid big bucks. :)

As previously detailed, I got the slip connection working. NFS attempts 
were a disaster, due to NFS timeouts. If anyone has info on avoiding 
that, by all means speak up.

I was able to install most of the packages by running an HTTP server on 
the slip host, and configuring apache to listen on the slip interface.
The kernel, glibc and glibc-common packages failed to install, complaining 
about disk space. I then downloaded them with wget, and left it running 
over night. 

Once the packages were available locally, I ran;
'rpm2cpio [package] | cpio -dim'
Which unpacked the packages, and installed the files. I then ran the glibc 
post install scripts manually. I was then able to continue with the 
remaining packages. (Since most everything requires the glibc packages, I 
needed to get those in place so pre and post scripts would execute 
properly)
I had wanted to run rpm -i --justdb on the forced packages, but it turns 
out that rpm is brain dead. Just trying to install the packages into the 
rpm database failed, saying there wasn't enough room to install the 
package. (There actually was just enough room, but that's another rant, 
as is rpm's habit of deleting the temp files when the install fails. 8M 
downloads shouldn't vanish without permission. :) The database updates 
should never have even looked at disk space, except perhaps for the 
little bit the database needed. )

At this point, to make room, I removed a good portion of the glibc locale 
and zone info files. I also deleted all documentation, and most of the 
kernel modules I didn't need. (At the end of the install, I ran depmod -a 
and removed a few more modules until all errors stopped when depmod -a 
was run.)

I manually configured and ran lilo, set a root password, unmounted 
everything, and rebooted. The boot failed, as I had forgotten to remove 
the temporary link from /newroot/proc to /proc. The kernel didn't like 
proc being linked to nowhere. Rebooting with the slinky disk and 
replacing the link with a directory solved the problem. (The link is 
removed and replaced by slinky, normally)

OK, enough rambling, here's the details on the installed system. Note that 
I added enough packages to be able to send mail. I'll comment the ones I 
added for that. I wanted mail mostly so I could send myself the details I 
am about to paste in here. I chose pine because it doesn't require 
sendmail, though it does require most or all of the same libraries. Pine 
and it's dependencies are probably responsible for at least 4 or 5M of 
disk space. The pine package alone is 2.6M.

I've relied on busybox to continue to provide some functionality normally 
provided by full packages. I also didn't install the rpm packages, the 
binary the installer provides gives enough functionality to get by.

/bin/
ash -> busybox
cpio -> busybox
vi -> busybox

/usr/bin/
chvt -> ../../bin/busybox
rpm2cpio -> ../../bin/busybox
wget -> ../../bin/busybox

Installed rpms via rpm -qa:
(manually adding the ones I couldn't add to the db.)

glibc-2.2.4-24
glibc-common-2.2.4-24
kernel-2.4.9-31

filesystem-2.1.6-2
lilo-21.4.4-14
glib-1.2.10-5
mingetty-0.9.4-18
modutils-2.4.13-0.7.1
sh-utils-2.0.11-5
fileutils-4.1-4
bzip2-1.0.1-4
grep-2.4.2-7
mount-2.11g-5
crontabs-1.10-1
procps-2.0.7-11
readline-4.2-2
slocate-2.6-1
tar-1.13.19-6
tmpwatch-2.8.1-1
zlib-1.1.3-25.7
SysVinit-2.78-19
pwdb-0.61.1-3
cracklib-2.7-12
textutils-2.0.14-2 (busybox has some of this functionality)
sed-3.02-10
iputils-20001110-6
util-linux-2.11f-17
openldap-2.0.21-1 (pine)
gdbm-1.8.0-10 (pine)
openssl-0.9.6b-8 (pine)
gzip-1.3-15
pine-4.44-1.72.0 (err, pine?)
setup-2.5.7-1
basesystem-7.0-2
bash-2.05-8
chkconfig-1.2.24-1
hdparm-4.1-2
libtermcap-2.0.8-28
file-3.35-2
bzip2-libs-1.0.1-4
bdflush-1.5-17
e2fsprogs-1.26-1.72
mktemp-1.5-11
gawk-3.1.0-3
diffutils-2.7.2-2
vixie-cron-3.0.1-63
psmisc-20.1-2
shadow-utils-20000902-4
passwd-0.64.1-7
mkinitrd-3.2.6-1
which-2.12-3
initscripts-6.43-1
pam-0.75-19
popt-1.6.4-7x
cracklib-dicts-2.7-12
db3-3.2.9-4
dev-3.2-5
net-tools-1.60-3
rootfiles-7.2-1
findutils-4.1.7-1 (busybox could have provided this function)
cyrus-sasl-1.5.24-23 (pine)
krb5-libs-1.2.2-13 (pine)
ncurses-5.2-12 (pine)

df output:
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2                73309     64149      6889  91% /
none                      2744         0      2744   0% /dev/shm

free output:
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          5492       4504        988          0        108       2392
- -/+ buffers/cache:       2004       3488
Swap:         8256       2748       5508

The installed system is usable, if a bit slow. I wouldn't want to try X, 
even if I had the disk space.

- -- 
- -Michael

pgp key:  http://www.tuxfan.homeip.net:8080/gpgkey.txt
Red Hat Linux 7.2 in 8M of RAM: http://www.rule-project.org/
- --
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