mandriva ram requirements

[jim123425]

hy i have this old computer with 4gb memory and 32 mb ram and i had installed DSlinux on it but i have problems with my ethernet card and mandriva is likely to be compatible.

but with mandriva you need at least 256 mb iof RAM

is it possible to first install mandriva then after installing convert some disk spaxce to vritual memory

would that work and how should i do that?

[daark.child]

32 megs of ram is really pushing it for Mandriva and I doubt that the installation will even work unless you install in text mode. other distros you can try are DSL, Debian and Vector Linux.

[jim123425]

i already tried debian and dsl but they arent compatible with my ethernet card a Trust ethernet pci combi 10mb

cant seem to find the drivers for it for linux either
so i thought maybe mandriva is compatible

but you can be able to assign disk space to virtual memory giving me 256 or more

or not?
if yes the n how do i do that?

[bigtomrodney]

Well the virtual memory you are talking about is pagefile (Windows) or swap (Linux/Unix). The memory requirements stated for Mandriva are for RAM and not for shared or swap memory. The Mandriva installer require 96MB of RAM just for the installer to allow you to proceed last I looked.

To be honest you're machine would be absolutely crippled with all of the swapping it would be doing using virtual memory. I'm guessing youare using either PC66 or PC100 RAM. You could probably pick up 128MB or 256MB for about €10 or even for free if you know where to look.

[jim123425]

well i have some more ram cards but they dont fit in my computer, and the only reaso nfor me to use mandriva is because damnsmlllinux couldn't detect my ethernet card debian netinstall couldn't either.
so i'm now focusing on that problem if you could help please see my topic in linux newbie

and i read something i the slackware department over network card detecting so iff you dould explain to me how i shoul detetc my network card in linux it would be great

[bryansmith]

Odds are that there's support in the kernel - then again, if its a rarely used chipset, then it may not be supported. I'm a bit short of time right now but perhaps a search on google for your network card + linux will yield some results.

[jim123425]

can tseem to find anything useful here:link

[BlahBlah_X]

Other distros to try:

AUSTRUMI
Puppy Linux
Vector Linux
Fluxubuntu
Feather Linux


These will all probably work and they are more up to date than DSL, meaning that they will have better support for your card.

I would try Feather Linux or Puppy first. I would save Vector or AUSTRUMI as a last resort, because their websites say they require at least 100 mb of RAM.

[Juan Pablo]

Everything that works on one distro should work on another, because it's Linux anyway (it will depend on the kernel version) but you may need some module loading

[jim123425]

how do i know wich modules?