Today I was forced by things that were beyond my control to search through all of the diverse PC equipment that I had hoarded over the years and of which I thought that I had already recycled it in total. However, it appeared that I still had two old midi-towers of which one seemed to be missing only a hard drive, two old hard drives of which one had relatively much disk space (14,2 GB) and some other things that are totally uninteresting for the rest of this story. Oh, I forgot: I also found a standard 10/100 NE-2000 compatible ethernet card. After putting these pieces together I had a Pentium I 200 Mhz workstation with about 8 MB of RAM and a hard drive of the aforementioned capacity. And it had an ethernet card in it. That was good. My mind immediately developed the idea to install Debian Linux on this machine. Together with OpenSSH and some shell scripts it would be perfectly suited for a small backup server for my private LAN.
Lucky me! I’d got a Debian Woody installer compact disk already in stock. Unfortunately it didn’t work. After the second fail I read the prerequisites and now I knew the problem. I needed 12 MB RAM to install Debian Linux. Okay, I thought. Just get a streamlined Linux distribution. Unfortunately there was not a single Linux distribution availlable that was still maintained and required less than 12 MB RAM for installation. Again: Lucky me! After about 4 hours of investigation on the net I found 2 old EDO RAM sticks, each of 8 MB capacity lying next to me on the table. You can imagine now how I boosted my PC to 16 MB RAM and was finally able to install Debian.
If you came here because you thought I might have a better solution to this problem, I’m sorry to disappoint you. In case you know of a distribution that requires less than 8 MB RAM for installation, isn’t too complicated to install (it needs to be installable from a cd because I have no system with a floppy disk at hand) and is still maintained, contact me.
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