Installing Suse Linux 9.2 / RAMDisk too small for YAST
Posted on March 22, 2005, under Technology.
I was trying to install Suse 9.2 on an old Compaq laptop today, but kept running into problems with YAST, saying that the 96 MB of RAM in the machine wasn’t enough for the ramdisk. After a little while of digging around, I realized the solution was to use the Rescue option of the install disk, and create a small, swap partition for YAST to use.
I created a 100MB swap partition on /dev/hda1, tried again, and it worked! YAST, while slow, loaded up. w00t and all that.
The steps I had to take using the Rescue console:
- Use fdisk to create a small swap partition. I made mine 100MB. Make sure to set the partition type code to 82 for Linux swap. Write partitioning to disk, and reboot back into Rescue console.
At the Rescue console, format the swap partition. I used reiserfs, and the command was: mkreiserfs /dev/hda1- Designate that partition as a swap partition: mkswap /dev/hda1
- Activate the swap partition: swapon /dev/hda1
- Reboot and try the installation process – it worked for me after these steps.
While these steps worked for me, they probably could use some refinement. Let me know if you would make any changes to the above steps..
Update: I don’t think you need to format a swap partition.
Update II: I’m silly. Using mkswap does format the swap partition.
