[CentOS] HOWTO install CentOS 6 on low memory computer or virtual machine (even 192MB RAM)
Tomasz Ostrowski
tometzky+centos at prhn.dnsalias.orgWed Jul 27 09:38:07 UTC 2011
- Previous message: [CentOS] Booting CentOS 6 in VirtualBox on Ubuntu
- Next message: [CentOS] HOWTO install CentOS 6 on low memory computer or virtual machine (even 192MB RAM)
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]
I've managed to install CentOS 6 on a 192MB virtual machine using LiveCD install-to-disk graphical method. This is not normally possible because of: - hard-coded minimum supported memory in Anaconda installer - it will show a message "You do not have enough RAM to install CentOS Linux on this machine" if you try or force you to use seriously crippled text installer; - a bug in Anaconda installer, which prevents it from using swap during installation. I think it would be useful to be able to install CentOS 6 (or Scientific Linux 6 or RedHat Enterprise Linux - RHEL 6) on low memory old computer or laptop, as it can be very capable firewall, home www server, proxy etc. So the procedure is as follows: 1. Boot to 32-bit CentOS LiveCD (CentOS-6.0-i386-LiveCD.iso) in graphical mode (if you have at least 256MB RAM) or text mode (if you have less than 256MB RAM). 2. Login as root. 3. Edit a file /usr/sbin/anaconda - using vim in text mode or gedit in graphical mode - search for "within" and modify function "within_available_memory" adding a line "return True" like this: def within_available_memory(needed_ram): return True # kernel binary code estimate that is # not reported in MemTotal by /proc/meminfo epsilon = 15360 # 15 MB return needed_ram < (iutil.memInstalled() + epsilon) This would get rid of artificial hard-coded memory requirement. 4. Edit a file /usr/lib/anaconda/storage/__init__.py - search for 4th occurrence of "swapoff" and modify a fragment of function "umountFilesystems" from: for device in devices: if not device.format.mountable and \ (device.format.type != "swap" or swapoff): continue to: for device in devices: if not (device.format.mountable and \ (device.format.type != "swap" or swapoff)): continue (add parentheses - left one after "if not" and right one after "or swapoff"). This would fix a bug in installer. 5. Run "liveinst" which should start graphical installer. 6. During installation create swap partition so that you have at least 1GB of available memory (RAM+swap) (default setup should suffice, but I personally do not recommend it as it used LVM, which AFAIK prevents disks from using barriers). The bug is reported upstream: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708966 but for Fedora Linux. Regards Tometzky -- ...although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were... Winnie the Pooh
- Previous message: [CentOS] Booting CentOS 6 in VirtualBox on Ubuntu
- Next message: [CentOS] HOWTO install CentOS 6 on low memory computer or virtual machine (even 192MB RAM)
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]
More information about the CentOS mailing list