On Thu, 2 Jun 2016 06:36:51 +0200 Nicolas Kovacs wrote:

The title says it all. What's the minimum RAM requirement for the CentOS 6.x graphic installer? In our public libraries we have some old hardware running CentOS 5, and I wonder if some of these machines can be upgraded to CentOS 6. Unfortunately RHEL 5.x' nifty text mode installer got seriously crippled with version 6.x.

I think that if you feed the install a kickstart file, it will install in accordance with what you told it, but that does mean you have to spend some time figuring out what to put in your kickstart first. This would also give you some consistency between systems.

Or you could let the 6.x "text installer" install it's minimal system, and then comeback and yum install everything else afterwards. fewer choices to make, but you get to live with RH's ideas of sane partition sizes.

Another option for installing on smaller machines is to use the live disk[1] and a few tweaks[2] to do the install. However it will mean some hand holding on each machine to make it work, but I have done it and been reasonably happy with the resulting system. Note on a really small system (512MB or smaller), the use of zram (with the normal centos kernel, and swappiness~99), or zswap (with the elrepo kernel-ml) will make the system operate a lot better. It is too bad the live disks to not enable zram while booting when they don't find a linux swap part.

[1] Have not seen the 6.8 live disk announce yet, https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2015-August/021304.html [2] "HOWTO install CentOS 6 on low memory computer or virtual machine (even 192MB RAM)" https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2011-July/115367.html

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