Out of memory error during install

JDenis_007 · n00b Joined: 08 Jun 2002 Posts: 48 Location: Canada

I am trying to install Gentoo on an old Cyrix 6x86 200+(166MHz) with 64Mb of ram. When I type "emerge --pretend system" as stated in the install instructions, i get an out of memory error. The exact error message I get is the following:"ut of memory : killed process 25106 (python 2.2)"(thats no typo, there really is no O at the beginning of the error message..) This happens while the system is seemingly trying to download a file named "glibc-2.2.5.tar.bz2" After I get this error message, the install program then goes on to download a couple of other files and then returns to the shell.

Could it be that I ran out of space on my HDD?? I only have 800MB mounted as /mnt/gentoo...

Thanks!

delta407 · Posted: Sat Jun 08, 2002 2:54 am Post subject:

It's not likely that you have a hard drive space issue, but rather that you have a RAM space issue (hence, "ut of memory

). Try setting up a swap partition (and be sure to activate it by swapon /dev/MYSWAPPARTITION).

JDenis_007 · n00b Joined: 08 Jun 2002 Posts: 48 Location: Canada

I have about 250mb of swapfile mounted as per the instructions on www.gentoo.org/doc/build.html ...
I am kind of limited in my HDD space.. I have 3 HDD installed in that macine, a 350mb one mounted as /mnt/gentoo/boot , a 800mb one mounted as /mnt/gentoo/ and a 250mb one mounted as swap , all of this as per instuctions on the gentoo website...
Maybe I forgot someting in the process, i'll try again tomorrow morning..
If you could suggest a better way to partition/mount my HDDs, i would really appreciate it.

delta407 · Posted: Sat Jun 08, 2002 3:06 am Post subject:

There's really no good reason to be running a 350 MB boot partition; most people's kernels are under 1.5 MB and more likely than not you're not going to be switching kernels all that much, so 30-40 MB is (usually) more than enough space. As per partitioning, given the low amount of RAM you have, you might want to look into setting up a stripe set (software RAID 0) between a partition on your 350 and 250 MB disks. (Make, say, a 100 MB /boot partition, then make a virual 500 MB of swap using both disks.) You'd get better response time out of your swap space.

To see how, exactly, you're running out of RAM, look at the output for "cat /proc/meminfo". Also, if top is available (and I'm not sure it is), you can switch terminals (Alt-Fx), run top, and hit shift-M to sort by RAM usage.

Also, consider buying a new hard drive; they're not all that expenside

jay · l33t Joined: 08 May 2002 Posts: 980

I think 800mb is quite to small. My gentoo uses in the moment 1.7 gb (kde3, gnome2, mozilla, openoffice and lots of other stuff)

When buying new HD take care, some older mainboards don't support HD's that are larger than 40GB, if you plan to buy a larger hd, check the website of your product, if they have a bios patch.
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