Excerpts from comp.os.linux (USENET): 26-Aug-92 Re: Up and Running linux
 ujlh@pool.info.sunyit.edu (James Henrickson) (2551)

quoted text
>It is not a pretty sight.  I just installed Linux on a second machine, a
>386SX-25 with 2 MB of RAM.  I have 880K free after the kernel is loaded,
>and bash takes a huge chunk of that.  I can run kermit but not shell out
>very often because I usually get a lot of "out of memory" errors.  (Swapping
>doesn't seem to eliminate these error messages, maybe my "working set" is
>too big to fit in 880K.)  When I *AM* able to run a command from within 
>kermit, it is S-L-O-W.

        Unless my understanding of VM is severly flawed (I hope not), having
very low physical memory should *NOT* cause errors (as long as the
kernel fits in memory, but it does, since it boots), as long as physical
memory+swap space is sufficient and swapping is on. You should even be
able to run a program that in and of itself is larger than all of the
available physical memory. This assumes that VM on your setup and on
Linux in general is working right (and that I'm not confused about VM :)

A couple of questions:

1. Are you sure you have enough swap space on disk?
2. Did you properly set up the swap partition (set partition id to swap,
mkswap) or swap file (using mkswap)?
3. Did you remember to enable swapping (using swapon) in /etc/rc or on
the command line?

If the answers to these are all yes:

4. Are you using a SCSI disk? (I heard there were problems with SCSI and
VM, but I could be off-base here).

I'd like to know for myself: Is there any difference, as far as a user
should be concerned, between swap and physical memory, other than
performance, and assuming that swapping is enabled? Do some programs
*need* a certain amount of real, physical memory?