Bug 795372

Summary:	installation fails on a PC with 512 MB of ram
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 12.2	Reporter:	Giacomo Comes <comes>
Component:	Installation	Assignee:	E-mail List <yast2-maintainers>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	Jiri Srain <jsrain>
Severity:	Normal
Priority:	P5 - None
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	PC
OS:	openSUSE 12.2
Whiteboard:
Found By:	---	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Giacomo Comes 2012-12-20 02:39:04 UTC

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Firefox/17.0

If I try to install 12.2 on a PC with 512MB of ram and I add during the installation the package texlive the installation fails with the error message:
Installation of some package failed.
Installation of 12.1 doesn't fail.
The failure is due to the fact that during the (network) installation the rpms
are downloaded in /var/cache/zypp/packages/openSUSE-12.2-1.6/suse/<etc>
which is located in the rootfs which is a ram disk. For a 512MG PC such rootfs is about 430MB of which about 160MB (32-bit) or 240MB (64-bit) are used by the installation system and 180MB or 260MB are free and available to store the downloaded rpms. texlive is about 270MB and doesn't fit in the available free space. 
I can think of a couple of way to fix the issue:
1) check if the rpm fits in the available free space and if not save it in the disk where the system is installed.
2) check if the rpm fits in the available free space and if not tell the user to deselect the package that doesn't fit. Such package can be installed later and a installation failure is avoided.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.install on a PC with 512MB of ram and select to install the package texlive
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
installation fails

Expected Results:  
installation should not fail

Comment 1 Jiaying Ren 2012-12-24 02:07:35 UTC

(In reply to comment #0)
> User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0
> Firefox/17.0
> 
> If I try to install 12.2 on a PC with 512MB of ram and I add during the
> installation the package texlive the installation fails with the error message:
> Installation of some package failed.
> Installation of 12.1 doesn't fail.
> The failure is due to the fact that during the (network) installation the rpms
> are downloaded in /var/cache/zypp/packages/openSUSE-12.2-1.6/suse/<etc>
> which is located in the rootfs which is a ram disk. For a 512MG PC such rootfs
> is about 430MB of which about 160MB (32-bit) or 240MB (64-bit) are used by the
> installation system and 180MB or 260MB are free and available to store the
> downloaded rpms. texlive is about 270MB and doesn't fit in the available free
> space. 
> I can think of a couple of way to fix the issue:
> 1) check if the rpm fits in the available free space and if not save it in the
> disk where the system is installed.
> 2) check if the rpm fits in the available free space and if not tell the user
> to deselect the package that doesn't fit. Such package can be installed later
> and a installation failure is avoided.
> 
> Reproducible: Always
> 
> Steps to Reproduce:
> 1.install on a PC with 512MB of ram and select to install the package texlive

Hi~Giacomo. Would your please tell me your HDD capacity ?

Comment 2 Giacomo Comes 2012-12-24 04:28:56 UTC

The laptop has a 20GB hard disk. But the installation fails also in a virtual machine with a 10GB hard disk or a 100GB hard disk.
The hard disk size is irrelevant. It's the memory size that matters.

Comment 3 Jeff Mahoney 2013-07-15 20:47:24 UTC

This isn't a kernel issue.

Comment 4 Dr. Werner Fink 2013-07-19 06:55:23 UTC

Even if it fails with texlive as this is one of the largest packages this is not an error of texlive.  The size of texlive is a matter of fact also that the used system has IMHO not enough RAM.

Beside this the current TeXLive 2012 does not have a few huge packages but round about 6000 small packages, see

 http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Publishing:/TeXLive/openSUSE_12.2/

but even with this the RAM of the system will be always the cause of swapping physical RAM out to the disk.  Simply starting a moderen Desktop (KDE or GNOME) and/or using a modern browser will be very slow.

Comment 5 Thomas Fehr 2013-07-22 09:19:15 UTC

Yes, memory consumption goes up with almost every release.
I would suggest to just install minimal system and install additional
packages from installed system where swap is active.