[clug] Abnormal exit from install of Fedora Core

[Rasjid Wilcox]

On Sunday 28 December 2003 20:20, Phil and Marlene Carter wrote:
> I have acquired an old 133 MHz Pentium III computer. I thought I'd set this
> computer on the One True Path, and get up to date at the same time by
> installing Fedora Core 1. I chose to set this computer up as a Linux-only
> machine, and I accepted most of the defaults, so there should be no unusual
> configuration problems. Package installation starts OK, but about 5-10% of
> the way through the install, it stops. Messages on the screen are not
> particularly helpful...

If it is only a P133, how much memory does it have?  Unless Fedora is somehow 
very different from the late RedHats, the average P133 machine is unlikely to 
have enough memory to run it well.  If it has less than 128MB RAM, you 
probably want to install in text mode, and you definitely don't want to 
attempt to run KDE.  Gnome may be okay, but there are much lighter window 
managers around, most of which generally run much better on low spec machines 
than either Gnome or KDE.

Personally, for the kind of machine I think this probably is, Debian may be a 
much better option.  A little while ago a large chunk of my RAM died.  I was 
left with only 64MB.  KDE under RedHat (RH8 I think) was unusable.  I 
installed Debian, and although very slow, KDE under Debian on the same 
machine was usable (although still not fun).  This was on an Athlon 1800 
(1.5Ghz), so lack of memory really was the only limiting factor.

Cheers,

Rasjid.

-- 
Rasjid Wilcox
Canberra, Australia (UTC +10 hrs)
http://www.openminddev.net