Handbook Talk:Alpha/Installation/Media

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A comment [[User:Larry|Larry]] 13:52, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
: A reply [[User:Sally|Sally]] 09:16, 23 June 2025 (UTC)
:: Your reply ~~~~

Alpha RAM requirements

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This discussion is done as of 2022-11-23.

It seems the minimum memory requirements are no longer accurate. I recently attempted to install Gentoo on a Multia UDB VX40 with 128MB, and the kernel panicked while booting. See https://youtube.com/shorts/Md_n6958SZM for more details. I will try again soon with 256MB. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by IanRomanick (talk • contribs) 2022-04-14

Hello, IanRomanick ! Thank you for sharing. It has admittedly been a long while since the Alpha handbook has had minimum requirements reviewed due to the rarity of alpha hardware still being used by our community (or even our developers). Please keep us in the loop on if you have success when using 256 MiB of memory. It could be very much true that the Linux kernel requires a much larger 'minimum amount' of memory than when the Handbook was last updated. It also would be very helpful for us to know if you used Gentoo's minimal installation or Alpha or other type of bootable media.

I'll take your word for it and bump the requirements to 256 MiB in advance of your findings. Please reopen and comment this discussion with your findings when you have them. Change can be viewed here: Special:Diff/392892/1167915. Thanks again! --Maffblaster (talk) 18:50, 23 November 2022 (UTC)