Frugal in 384M RAM

[Member seaken64]

I think I made a mistake installing antiX-17 Core as a frugal install on one of my old Pentium-III systems with only 384M of RAM. When I tried to do a dist-upgrade I ran into a problem I had seen before with running out of space. I went back an re-read all the messages when I had that problem with a LiveUSB but things don’t seem to be the same.

The old threads are here:
https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/size-error-for-remaster-of-liveusb/
https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/space-used-on-disk-with-live-persistance/

Anyway, I was able to remaster but when I tried to increase the size of the root persist file I can only get it to 369M, the size of memory. I tried removing it from the boot line in grub. But I cannot figure out how to increase the size. The largest size I can get is to the maximum of the RAM. I thought if I used “static” I could use a larger size, up to whatever the disk will take. I deleted the .old files and the disk has enough physical space available, about 2GB.

So, I cannot upgrade because I don’t have room. The RAM on this machine is 384M. I tried remastering again and it worked again. Only this time I used the faster choice for compression. Now when I reboot I get an error saying ‘LIBPAM_MISC_1.0’ is not found and I can’t login. I think I can reboot and choose the old linux.fs file but I can’t figure out how. I have a feeling it’s on the grub boot line. I think I will start over.

I think I will not use the frugal install on this machine. I will try installing to a physical partition instead. Frugal and limited RAM seem to be a bad combination.

Seaken64

[Member Xecure]

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I think the option you need to select is f_static_root

From https://antixlinux.com/antix-19-isos-available/
p_static_root
Enable static root persistence. Note “persist_static” now requires
both root and home persistence to be enabled. In the past, home
persistence was optional.

f_static_root
Same as above with frugal enabled as well so it means do a
frugal install with static root persistence.
If you selected this, make sure you also changed the boot parameter.

Sorry. Didn’t realize it was antiX 17. Then this is not related. You must have selected frugal_static, so this should work for you.

I will see if I can find something about LIBPAM can only be related to am-elogind-compat. Maybe it updated to libpam-elogind? but I don’t understand what this does or how to fix itknow how to fix this.
Maybe anticapitalista can explain.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by Xecure.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by Xecure.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by Xecure.

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Member seaken64]

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I think I will try it with antiX-19 core. I had installed this antiX-17 core a long time ago. I’m not worried about losing anything. Maybe version 19 will give me more options for the size of the root persistence file. No harm in trying it.

Seaken64

[Member Xecure]

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I wanted to edit my other post, as I realised that you were talking about antiX 17 and not antiX 19. I wanted to rectify that it may be related to libpam-elogind-compat. But I don’t really know.

In antiX 19 you need to select f_static_root.

p_static_root
Enable static root persistence. Note “persist_static” now requires
both root and home persistence to be enabled. In the past, home
persistence was optional.

f_static_root
Same as above with frugal enabled as well so it means do a
frugal install with static root persistence.

This was introduced by Bitjam in antiX 19 (not for antiX 17)
https://antixlinux.com/antix-19-isos-available/

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Member seaken64]

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@Xecure, thanks for the tip. I decided to blow away the antiX-17 Core and I installed the antiX-19 Core, choosing the f_static_root from the F5 menu. It allowed me to create a larger root persistence file. it defaulted to 1.45G.

There was always something wrong with the version 17 Core frugal I had installed. I had to use Sudo to start mc and I was always getting segmentation faults. Now I can start mc normally with my username and I can move around the file system at will.

I will have to re-install the audio driver for Yamaha but I think this was the right choice to go with version 19.2.

Seaken64

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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seaken64 wrote:

@Xecure, thanks for the tip. I decided to blow away the antiX-17 Core and I installed the antiX-19 Core, choosing the f_static_root from the F5 menu. It allowed me to create a larger root persistence file. it defaulted to 1.45G.

There was always something wrong with the version 17 Core frugal I had installed. I had to use Sudo to start mc and I was always getting segmentation faults. Now I can start mc normally with my username and I can move around the file system at will.

I will have to re-install the audio driver for Yamaha but I think this was the right choice to go with version 19.2.

Seaken64

Glad that it worked out for you. Just shows that my recent simplistic use cases no longer exercise very much. Though I’ve tried various different live boot combinations, I haven’t introduced or exposed any issues that could have been resolved – and I have to admit, I really haven’t tried anything “devious” – I WAS a good tester in the past. Alas, now I’m simply a happy user, and I have a few very solid use cases that I can use with MX Linux and antiX.

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Brian Masinick

[Member seaken64]

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I’m setting up antiX-19 Core frugal now. I should have done this a long time ago. I stayed with 17 because it was working – until I went to upgrade it yesterday. I had to install firmware for the Yamaha DS-1 audio since antiX doesn’t work with it OOTB. But once I did that I was back to normal. I was able to upgrade and am now doing a remaster. antiX-19 seems to have no problem allowing me to set a larger root persistence file. But I did notice that there is no separate home folder in the file list. Perhaps it is now inside the rootfs file.

Now I am wondering what will happen to this frugal install when I go to upgrade the current antiX-16 hard disk installation with antiX-19 Base. I’m thinking I will need to backup the frugal install to a removable drive before I proceed to install the new version to the hard disk. I’ll have to get that figured out next.

Seaken64

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Back up copies and more than one way to run a system are good ways to make sure that there is always something that works to use.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by Brian Masinick. Reason: clarity

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Brian Masinick

[Member seaken64]

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Brian Masinick wrote:

Back up copies and more than one way to run a system are good ways to make sure that there is always something that works to use.

I’m willing to go to the edge on this system since there nothing I can’t afford to lose. I keep another P-III system that I take more care with since I want to keep it as my main P-III driver.

In this other one I am going to eventually upgrade from antiX-16 to antiX-19. At that time I will back up the antiX-19 Core frugal install before I attempt the upgrade. I will install over the existng system and won’t try to save anything from the home folder of the antiX-16 system.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Go for it! As long as you have ways to get a usable system, sometimes experimenting, even breaking it can be very educational, especially once you are able to determine what works out and what doesn’t.

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Brian Masinick

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