[Wolves] Couple of (redhat) problems

[Adam Sweet]

Hi Bob,

it seems as though this is an increasing problem with
Red Hat, it still amazes that memory requirements have
risen so much.

The first port of call would be to look at a similar
posting we had not long back, it's on the mailing list
archives at

http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/wolves/2003-June/002267.html
and my reply at
http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/wolves/2003-June/002274.html

As regards distros, if you really don't want to buy
more RAM after trying different window managers (Aq
likes Rox) and disabling services as detailed in my
posting above, try Mandrake. I have run it recently
(v9.0, though 9.1 is now out) on a 667Mhz with 128MB
RAM and it was comfortable. Mandrake and Red Hat are
really pretty similar with Mandrake aiming to make
your life that little bit easier.

It would be shame to use an older version of Linux as
things have come on a lot in the last 18 months in
terms of usability.

As for the VFS problem. A bit of googling around told
me that VFS is the kernel Virtual File System which
allows the kernel to manage various file sytem types.
Now thats not something I know much about but I found
an explanation at
http://www.moses.uklinux.net/patches/lki-3.html which
is part of 'Linux Kernel 2.4 Internals' so it's going
to be pretty heavy going and certainly not something I
dare bloody my hands trying to understand! I wondered
what filesystem you were using for your root
filesystem as it may not be supported in the
version(s) of Red Hat you were getting the error with.

The google results I picked up for your exact error
message are mainly Red Hat (which appear to be
unavailable) and SuSE ones. The SuSE one
http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/rootfs_0803_install.html
suggests entering

linux mem=128M

as a kernel paramater at the boot prompt. Though I
think SuSE uses Lilo as a boot manager and Red Hat
uses Grub. I assume that Grub supports this kind of
parameter passing but I've never tried it and whether
this is the solution is another thing. I think most
installation routines offer you the option to pass
kernel parameters as they start however.

If all else fails, try Mandrake. I assume that as
you're on Blueyonder you have cable so it will take
you a day or 2 to get the isos and burn them to disk.
Though are you really sure you can't afford some more
ram as 128MB starts at about £15 and 256MB starts at
about £25.

Thats my advice, the easy route is buy more RAM or try
Mandrake. The hard way is all the other stuff above.

Good luck,

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