F16 on Old Laptop: 512MB RAM

[alan_f]

I was hoping to be able to run one of the spins of F16 on an old laptop with 512MB of RAM. I booted up the LXDE spin CD, but when trying to install it says I need 768MB of RAM. Is there a different spin I should be looking at, or is this a lost cause? I've had good luck with older versions, such as F11, on systems with less RAM -- what would you do?

The hope is to get a few more months of use out of a dying laptop, and planning on buying a replacement in mid-2012.

Thanks,
Alan

[John the train]

As I recall it's Anaconda which requires 768MB RAM, so any ' normal ' F16 spin will require it. I think this requirement came in with F15, but I'm not 100% sure. If you have a F11-13 CD available you can give it a try, but there won't be any updates or security patches. I don't know what the RAM requirements are for an install from a pendrive, as I've never tried that, but a forum search should turn up some info. If all else fails you could consider extending the laptop's useful life ( if only as a back-up ) with some version of Puppy Linux - I'm running a recent version on a laptop with 192MB RAM!

[alan_f]

Thanks for the ideas -- I may give the DVD installer a try instead and just install what I need from it. I considered installing F11 or F12 as I've had good luck with them, but not having updates is an issue.

Thanks,
Alan

[jenaniston]

I am going to chime in that the (listed) minimum RAM requirements in Fedora may have more leeway than ya' might think.

I have run F14 LXDE on ridiculously low, old Gateway towers (128 MB RAM)
of course in only terminal mode (runlevel 3 at the boot screen options), just to get started -
and then when I finally did add a couple of RAM cards into the tower,
I unbelievably could run in the full graphical interface F14 LXDE with 356 MB RAM.

Amazing . . . to me at least.

The trick - in my experience - is adding swap -
and not just the appearance of swap space but a verifiable swap space using mkswap
- verified with the free -m command.

Now, of course I am not on that old tower, but still have my swap space.

# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          2757       1046       1711          0         42        381
-/+ buffers/cache:        622       2135
Swap:          499          0        499

. . . and btw, I think it is a great learning effort to use minimal RAM (when you need to, in a crunch - on old laptops or whatever),
and the constantly increasing RAM needs of the latest edge of Fedora and other linux can be sometimes a nuisance if not an outright semi-problem, imho.

Good luck.

[witek]

look here
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=264796

[AdamW]

yeah, you can try the hack from that thread to remove anaconda's hard-coded floor. it may well work, because the floor is really set too high in f16: we made anaconda a bit more efficient in terms of RAM usage than it was in f15, but didn't lower the floor. 512MB is marginal, but may work.

for F17 we've made anaconda more efficient again, and the floor should be lowered this time, so if you can't get 16 to fly, wait for 17 and it should be okay.

[alan_f]

Good to know about F17. For now, it looks like Ubuntu is the path of least resistance. That, or load an older Fedora. It's too bad it doesn't just warn you, then let you proceed at your own caution. I'd think 512MB RAM would be enough for at least a text-only minimal system...

I loaded F16 on a couple of other systems -- still getting used to Gnome 3.

Thanks for all of the info. everyone.

-Alan

[RHamel]

What I did on my old laptop with 512 MB was to install Ubuntu 11.10. It's running quite nicely.

[pacific0]

La reponse dans le forum anglais (je ne l'ai pas essayé encore):

Je pense que c'est quand on est dans la live cd.

edit /usr/sbin/anaconda, chercher cette ligne:

needed_ram = int((isys.MIN_RAM + extra_ram) / 1024)

et la changer par:

needed_ram = 0

cependant il peut être remplacé automatiquement pendant les mises a jour du système.
)

lien ici:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=264796

Salutations