There once was a time debian just couldn ... / 2012-08-20

There once was a time debian just couldn't install anymore on a machine with less than 12 mebibyte memory (12582912 bytes). I looked it up, this must have been Debian Potato: Installing Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 For Intel x86 - System Requirements. We're now at the level were 128 mebibyte is not enough for running Ubuntu 10.04 server. During startup the out-of-memory killer kills ureadahead and plymouth.

This is on an indeed aging machine (bios date 07/15/97), but I am somewhat dissapointed how big a 'minimal' install is. I blacklisted every unneeded but automatically loaded kernel module to free up some kernel memory after boot.

Update 2012-08-21: That indeed helped to get rid of the regular 'page allocation failure' messages.