On Sat, 2007-09-22 at 14:22 -0700, Barry Schiffman wrote:
I'm trying to install centos 5 on an old machine, a Micron with a pentium III and 250 megs of ram. I'm using the DVD image.
The media check said the DVD was OK.
Everything starts fine (both in graphics and text modes), untl I get to the custom partition table. The new system will go on hda, with the boot and root partition reformatted (see below). I laid it out to preserve the data on /home and another two partitions with a lot of data on each. One of these is mounted as /proj but Anaconda shows it as a giant swap partition.
I don't know if this is your problem, but check here
http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS5.0/
under known problems and here *may* apply
http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=1232
although it references CentOS 4.
More:
http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/report.php? forum=27&topic_id=8031&viewmode=flat&order=ASC&post_id=25410
what led me to find these is that ISTR several posts specifying that a text install takes 256MB and graphical needs 512MB. Although I googled (only a reasonable amount) with "site:centos.org", I didn't find the threads I remembered.
Maybe if you google it, you'll have better luck. Anyway, I hope you have good luck on the install.
<snip>
FWIW, I have successfully installed CentOS 4 on and AMD K6 w/256MB ram. You might want to do that and then upgrade to 5.0.
<warning> ISTR that upgrade 4.x->5.0 was not a straightforward process. Several threads exist about that and (IIRC) one nice community member has posted a step-by-step (in the wiki?). </warning>
Anyway, google, check the wiki, etc. I'm sure you can get where you want to be.
HTH -- Bill