Install hang on 486

[James Stark]

On a old HP Vectra VE 486/66 with three NICs (ne3, tl0, ep0).
The configuration seems relatively standard, with nothing major
(AFAIK) coming up during the floppy boot. Install of 2.6
goes smooth until the "Making all Device Nodes" where it
appears to just hang. I left the thing overnight last night
to find a non-responsive system. Just disabled the Power
Mgmt crap in BIOS and retried the install, hoping that was
the issue, but it has been stuck there for awhile now.....

I can still ping the machine...should I keep waiting?
Is there anything that I can do to further discern where
it is crapping out?

Thanks much
James

[Theo de Raadt]

> On a old HP Vectra VE 486/66 with three NICs (ne3, tl0, ep0).
> The configuration seems relatively standard, with nothing major
> (AFAIK) coming up during the floppy boot. Install of 2.6
> goes smooth until the "Making all Device Nodes" where it
> appears to just hang. I left the thing overnight last night
> to find a non-responsive system. Just disabled the Power
> Mgmt crap in BIOS and retried the install, hoping that was
> the issue, but it has been stuck there for awhile now.....

I think you forgot to say that you are trying to install with 8MB
of ram. That's not enough. You need more to install. There is
a workaround in the FAQ, I believe.

[CyberPsychotic]

~ :(AFAIK) coming up during the floppy boot. Install of 2.6
~ :goes smooth until the "Making all Device Nodes" where it
..
~ :the issue, but it has been stuck there for awhile now.....

check the list archives back to december or so. The similar problem has
been reported and a soultion has been posted. (basically you need to drop
into shell after you extracted base* tarball and turn your swap on,
you're lacking memory while making device nodes otherwise)

[STeve Andre']

What is the smallest amount of ram 2.6 needs to actually run? I
have a possible project which needs a little intelligence to read data
off a serial port, process and log it. The code is pretty trivial and
less than 500 lines of C.

But how little ram could I get away with, running this? Could 2.6
be happy in 4M? 6M? I know that to install I'd need more, etc.

Thanks,

--STeve Andre'
and...@msu.edu

[CyberPsychotic]

~ : But how little ram could I get away with, running this? Could 2.6
~ :be happy in 4M? 6M? I know that to install I'd need more, etc.
~ :

I was able to boot custom kernel on 4M, but I think this would really
depend on your hardware configuration. 6M should be definetely be enough
for most.