OT: ubuntu install problem

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, May 19, 2008, Fairlight wrote:
>At Mon, May 19, 2008 at 09:19:36AM -0700 or thereabouts, 
>suspect Bill Campbell was observed uttering:
>> I don't know about Ubuntu, but 256MB RAM on a Thinkpad is pretty dicey for
>> many current versions of Linux.  I ran Linux on my Thinkpad 600 for years
>
>You serious?  What happened to the days of, "Will run with 4MB of
>RAM...including X11?"  (Which I've done on a 386sx/16MHz 4MB, I might add).
>Assuming you don't run X, what's requiring so darned much memory?

Can you spell code bloat?

The default desktop for SuSE at that time was KDE (it may still
be, but it's been a while since I used any Linux desktop other
than gnome when initially installing CentOS systems).

It is certainly possible to run Linux on small platforms, and
it's being done in various routers and similar network appliances.

>Somewhere they lost their way within the development circles, if that's the
>reality these days.  (It shouldn't be...there are specs for running CentOS
>on a Qube3, and that only has 128MB.)

I think that's called the Blue Quartz project or something
similar.  The Cobalt boxes don't run with a GUI user interface
with the huge RAM requirements of a desktop manager.

>Still, it doesn't make sense to me that memory is the issue if it dies in
>the middle of fdisk.  That's not actually a memory intensive program.
>Sounds more like a driver incompatibility to me.

Could it be attempting to squash an existing Windows partition?
That could easily take a lot of resources.

Bill
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