Re: Linux-2.4.20 on a 4 MB Laptop

[William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>]

On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 04:01:55PM +0200, Hermann Himmelbauer wrote:
> I currently try installing Linux on an old IBM Laptop. (IBM Thinkpad 340, 
> 486SLC 25/50 from 1994). The laptop only has 4 MB RAM, so I installed a 
> simple Linux distribution on a better computer, recompiled Linux 2.4.20 and 
> stripped out everything I could (with menuconfig): No networking. FPU 
> emulation. The only "luxury" I left is "ext3" - perhaps this uses a lot of 
> memory?
> Well - anyway, the kernel boots but right stops after:
> INIT: Entering runlevel:3
> The next line is:
> INIT: open(/dev/console): Input/output error
> INIT: Id "2" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
> ...
> That's it.
> What I want to know is if this happens just because of the low memory (4MB) or 
> if there is another reason for this behaviour.
> What do you think: What are the minimum requirements for Linux on such a 
> laptop (no X, of course, very simple setup): 8MB, 12MB?

Try using init=/bin/sh, doing swapon manually, and then exec /sbin/init

-- wli