16M RAM enough for FreeBSD 6.1?

[Nikolas Britton]

On 8/26/06, Torfinn Ingolfsen <torfinn.ingolfsen at broadpark.no> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have an old laptop, a Compaq Armada 1580DMT, with 16M RAM, 2GB hd,
> floppy and CD-rom. It doesn't have built in networking, neither wired
> nor wireless. It does have PC card slots. It has had FreeBSD 4.9-release
> installed a long time, and was recently upgraded to 4.11-release from
> CD, sucessfully.
>
> However, I would like better pccard support, ie. 32 bit cardbus and
> wireless network cards, so I would like to install 6.1-release (or
> -stable) on it.

How do you know it has CardBus / PCMCIA 2.1 / JEIDA 4.2? have you
checked? This standard was introduced in 1995.

> However, when I try the 6.1-release CD (CD1), it boots as far as
> loading the kernel, botting the kernel, and then reboots again??
>
> I have also tried 6.0-release, and 7.0-current (both July 06 and Aug 06
> snapshots) with the same results.
>
> Are 16 Megs of RAM to little to install FreeBSD 6.0 or newer?

Yep. Try DragonFly BSD, it's based on FreeBSD 4.x code so it should be
able to cope with an antique such as this. NetBSD would also be a good
choice. I would say at least 32MB for FreeBSD 6.x... my FreeBSD
6.1-STABLE kernel is using 52MB (I think I have debugging enabled
though).



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