16M RAM enough for FreeBSD 6.1?

[Darren Pilgrim]

Torfinn Ingolfsen wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have an old laptop, a Compaq Armada 1580DMT, with 16M RAM, 2GB hd, 
> floppy and CD-rom. It doesn't have built in networking, neither wired
> nor wireless. It does have PC card slots. It has had FreeBSD 
> 4.9-release installed a long time, and was recently upgraded to 
> 4.11-release from CD, sucessfully.
> 
> However, I would like better pccard support, ie. 32 bit cardbus and 
> wireless network cards, so I would like to install 6.1-release (or 
> -stable) on it. However, when I try the 6.1-release CD (CD1), it 
> boots as far as loading the kernel, botting the kernel, and then 
> reboots again??

Try turning off all power management and plug-and-play support in the
BIOS and booting FreeBSD without ACPI.  Try combinations of these three 
things.  Often older hardware has really broken APM/ACPI support that 
makes FreeBSD do odd things.

Failing that, you may need to build a custom kernel with just the 
minimum required to get yourself to a shell prompt.  You can build a new 
kernel with cardbus, usb and other extras after you get FreeBSD installed.

-- 
Darren Pilgrim