Naturally as soon as Ubuntu 6.10 “Edgy Eft” was out, I wanted it. I went to install it on my test machine but found a little issue.

My test PC is an older machine and has 256MB of RAM, not a lot by today’s standards but should be enough to install a basic operating system right ?

Well, even though Ubuntu mentions 128MB as being the minimum memory requirement, the INSTALLER requires 256MB. My machine has onboard graphics, and the graphics eats 64MB of system memory leaving me with only 192MB. The standard installer will not run under these circumstances, it gets as far as the timezone configuration and then just freezes.

If you want to run Edgy with 256MB or less, you will need to get the text-mode installer which is available on the Alternate Install Disc. Which is what I have done. I now have a shiny new Edgy machine. I haven’t played with it much yet but so far it seems pretty nice.