I'm mostly self-taught and not well off at all, hence my weak hardware and paranoia about my hard drive failing

Unfortunately, this forum doesn't have a private message function, so I'd have to ask here instead. Sorry.

Where are you located and is your hard-drive (what size/capacity?) SATA or IDE? I may have a spare drive available if shipping costs don't spiral out of control. (as I'm also not well off, but probably better then yourself, judging from your description)

PS: for ease of mind, install Gsmartcontrol and have it run a short self-test on your disk. SMART is the tool interface for monitoring disk-health.

Installation is working

Glad to know

It would let me select an drive to install grub and then nothing would happen. I left it alone for 45 minutes last night and nothing happened.

Future releases will have a real graphical debconf frontend. (thanks, miyo!)

Diff-ing two 700 MB disc images is relatively memory intensive.

Agreed.

I have no direct experience about this, but this info could be relevant: http://coldattic.info/post/40/

So, be prepared to the more bizarre behaviour of your programs (I've been there)

Looking forward. Best luck

MysticLord wrote:

I only have 4 GB

I don't know the uses you are planning for you computer, but in my use cases 4 GB is a lot of memory. (I'm kind of a heavy user).

My main laptop has 1 GB and run Devuan ASCII 64 bits very easily.

I have a poorly-thought-out print-differences script I use that regularly eats up 7/8 of available memory. Diff-ing two 700 MB disc images is relatively memory intensive. Some of that may be because I use java.

Other than that I want to teach myself C and I figure I'll extra RAM will come in handy for when I screw up and a process eats O(n) memory in O(n) time... A few extra seconds to hit Ctrl + Z before my OS does who knows what when it runs out of memory.

I'm mostly self-taught and not well off at all, hence my weak hardware and paranoia about my hard drive failing if I have a swap partition that gets use periodically when something goes wrong. My hope is to get a job as a C programmer in a few years and move overseas.

On topic, I opted to install the DVD here:
https://mirror.leaseweb.com/devuan/devu … _dvd-1.iso

I'm doing this because this (https://mirror.leaseweb.com/devuan/devu … README.txt) recommends I use the DVD for an offline install. I'll burn it to a USB in a few minutes and let you know if I have any errors.

I only have 4 GB

I don't know the uses you are planning for you computer, but in my use cases 4 GB is a lot of memory. (I'm kind of a heavy user).

My main laptop has 1 GB and run Devuan ASCII 64 bits very easily.

Have a read of this https://mirror.leaseweb.com/devuan/devu … README.txt

Im assuming you have a 64bit computer, if so choose the first iso amd64_cd_1.iso

The default desktop is XFCE4. Just go with that, it is a good lean desktop that will be easy on memory.

edit

I'll find out!

ASCII, desktop live.

I would try standard Devuan ASCII instalation.

Downloaded from here, the amd64 version:
https://mirror.leaseweb.com/devuan/devu … ktop-live/

I am a bit confused as fsmithread seems to think you are using refracta installer but i dont think pure devuan uses refracta installer?

The blue windows for choosing the location never appeared, instead the installation terminal gave a message formatted to look like a dialog box which did not respond to clicks (what I expected) or clicking into the terminal and hitting Enter. I didn't think to Ctrl C or Ctrl Z in the terminal so I'll try that the next time I attempt to install later today.

When it hangs, take a look in /var/log/refractainstaller.log (or refractainstaller_error(s).log depending on the version) or post/paste it somewhere for me to see.

Does your hard drive have msdos or gpt partition table?