Description of problem: I'm trying to install FC6 on an Toshiba Tecra 8200. The installation seems to start normally. Because of the small memory it uses text mode installation, and activates swap during installation, but otherwise nothing in particular. But after installing some packages, nothing more happens. It happens in different places, but it often happens around glibc-common. Sometimes it gets further, and hangs at festival. Switching to the shell in virtual terminal 2 I see that anaconda is spinning, using all the CPU. But even if I wait very long, it doesn't get further. I'm not sure this is an anaconda bug. I chose that component since I see anaconda behave strangely. But it could of course be something else anaconda depends on, like the kernel, which makes anaconda go into some loop. I've tried to install from CD, and to boot from CD but install over FTP, with the same result. The installation CD does pass mediacheck. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): FC6 distribution image.
How much memory do you have? If it's less than 256MB (which would force text mode), I'd suggest unchecking *ALL* package groups that are flagged. What will happen is the base set of things will get installed and then you can boot up after that and use yum to install other things.
The machine has only 128 MB. Unchecking everything didn't help though. It hang at glibc-common in that case too, and I guess is pretty hard to avoid THAT package. If it is a memory issue, I can imagine the build-locale-archive job which is run in the postinstall of glibc-common influences this. But why would anaconda fail with small physical memory? I mean, swap is activated, so the total virtual memory should be enough. (I see with "free" that some, but not very much, swap space is used.) What is it in anaconda that requires real physical memory? I tried to install FC5, and that worked fine. So I guess upgrading with yum from there could be a workaround. (Though I'm still curious why anaconda needs physical memory.)
It's not anaconda that's failing, it's yum and rpm in the backend that need large amounts of room to work. 256MB is the minimum required to install FC6. Doing a yum upgrade from FC5 will probably work fine for you, though it is annoying. Closing this as CANTFIX since there's not really anything I can do about it for FC-6. Reducing the runtime memory requirements of yum and rpm is a goal, but I'm not sure how much they can be reduced.
I see. I'll do a "manual" upgrade with yum. But why isn't virtual memory good enough? Swap space is nowhere near being exhausted.
The required resident size is larger than 128M, so swap doesn't matter much in this case. Some architectures it works on because the package depsolving phase doesn't creep over 128M.
Ok. I thought processes typically were not even aware if parts were paged out or not. But I guess anaconda does something very special. FWIW we made a virtual (VMWare) machine with only 96 MB memory. That one DID install FC6 fine, although it had even less physical memory tna my laptop. It was doing a lot of swapping from time to time, but it never hang.