MEPIS Community Forum

I was going to install Mepis 11 onto my mother-in-laws computer this weekend. But I found that it only has 512 MB of RAM. (Its an old HP Pavilion laptop). I could run the livecd on the system. Although it was aganizingly slow. I thought an installed version would be faster but I couldn't install it. I assume I just didn't have enough memory to run the live cd and install the system. So is their any way to install Mepis directly and not through the live cd? I did manage to install SolusOS which is also based on Debian 6.0 but it uses Gnome 2.0 so its a bit lighter.

While MEPIS 11 can be installed on a 512MB machine if you make a swap partition on the drive beforehand, it's not worth the trouble.
Even with a 1GB swap partition it's slow & glitchy. I experimented a lot when it was in beta and 768MB was the lowest practical amount of ram for MEPIS 11 with its KDE 4.5.3.
Supposedly newer KDE versions have improved in that respect, but that doesn't help when you're installing.

You might consider Antix instead as it works much better on low ram machines.

Did you pre-partition the drive with a standalone disk like GParted? If you already have a swap in place, that might be enough to get it done.

Otherwise, an install with USB might do it. You might need to use the PLoP boot disk to enable booting to USB.

That said, M11 performance with only 512MB will be poor. If you can't bump the RAM to 1024MB, IMO you should stay away from M11.

I managed to get M11 installed on a 512MB machine with great difficulty, but it doesn't run very well at all.

I had M8.5 on that same machine before and it ran very nicely.

For machines that are stuck with a low amount of RAM:

You could boot to a failsafe session from the CD login session menu, then login from the xterminal and launch the installer:


That way you just have to load the QT 4 libraries and not the KDE 4 desktop. After installation, you could install a lighter desktop from the same failsafe terminal (assuming you get a net connection) such as lxde, xfce4, or maybe GNOME 2.X. You'll have a more generic Debian desktop but still have the MEPIS kernel and utilities.

Thanks Steve. I tried to do that but I didn't know the proper install command. But reading the other post it sounds like Mepis 11 is too heavy for her machine anyway. Since its my mother in laws first experience with Linux and since her reasons for trying it are XP is too slow and she gets too many virus, I better keep something fast on there. SolusOS actually works quite well except for some video glitches and a wireless issue. So I may stick to that, but I'll consider Mepis with other DE, but something stock might be better for her.

Its kind of too bad the Gnome change as much as it did. I'm finding I like Gnome 2.0. I'm also starting to find that I don't use all the features of KDE4 and I'm starting to wih they stock to the simplicity of kde 3.0 as well. So know I find myself starting to look at the other DEs like xfce and lxde. But they just seem a little too minimal and I really miss the more traditional layout. Not to mention I miss dolphin when I am using other DEs. I've come to really like Dolphin.

Anyway, thanks for the help. I think thats all I need.