more than 128 M needed for liveCD

[Jonathan Carter]

Hi Jani

On Mon, 2006-11-06 at 19:09 +0200, Jani Monoses wrote:
> Unfortunatley we have a bad regression since dapper. The liveCD will
> not function properly
> with 128M of RAM and no swap. This I only noticed in qemu and wrongly
> assumed (hoped) it's
> specific to it, but we get bugreports confirming it on real machines. 
> This sadly makes xubuntu lose one of its selling points :( I have no
> idea what causes the extra memory
> use, it may be system-tools-backend which use perl, but I don't know
> for sure.

I'm working on a local derivative of Edubuntu/Xubuntu for schools, and
I've let local people know that we will be using the live cd
infrastructure. Some of the more technical people was already unhappy
about this because the livecd doesn't have a rescue mode, and the bigger
problem they have is that you can't install it on low memory (like
128MB) machines.

What I've done to get arround this, is make the default session a little
python+glade interface I created, where they can start the installer
without logging into the Xubuntu session, this allows you to even
install it on a computer with a bit less than 128MB RAM, here's a
screenshot of the chooser I made:
http://photos.jonathancarter.co.za/screenshots/dvd (artwork not final
yet, it will look way better when it's done).

I showed this to cjwatson, and he suggested that it gets integrated in
GDM instead. That gave me an idea for a fix for this problem for Xubuntu
too, you could add another session to GDM that will just run ubiquity,
and make it possible to install on a low-end machine. Otherwise, I'd be
glad to share my tool when it's more polished, but at the moment the
code isn't very elegant at all. :)

-Jonathan