InstallUbuntuOnLowMemorySystems

How to install Ubuntu on low memory systems

How to install an Ubuntu-Desktop on low memory systems (Pentium II and III Processor, 32-256 MB RAM)

An approach targeting minimal packages and a lightweight desktop is described at http://www.binonabiso.com/en/Ubuntu-miniRAM-HOWTO.html

Regarding the actual install, I tried to install Ubuntu on a laptop with 48Meg RAM. Using expert mode, it always failed at the partitioning step.

Opening another shell, I found lots of modules installed, even though I had selected the minimum. It does this for hardware detect, and partitioning ('xfs', 'reiserfs', 'vfat' etc modules installed). There appears (Warty) to be no 'rmmod'.

My (successful) tactics were to approach partitioning, then (in another shell) replace both 'modprobe' and 'insmod' (which were symlinks to 'busybox') with shell scripts saying '/bin/true', to ensure they completed without error and did nothing.