GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
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System Parameters

First we need to check (and possibly modify) some system parameters.

Check how much memory you have:

  $ grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo

If you have more than 500,000 kB (i.e., about 500MB) then all should be good. If you have less memory, you should still be able to install and run Oracle, but make sure you have enough swap space. Hans Schou reports running on a 800MHz, 256MB RAM laptop under Mandrake GNU/Linux. In general though, to improve the performance of your machine, a memory upgrade is always a good start! You can check the amount of swap space you have with:

  $ grep SwapTotal /proc/meminfo

Anything more than 1,000,000 kB (i.e., about 1GB) is good. If you have less, make your swap partition bigger or else add some more swap with something like:

  # dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1024 count=1024
  # mkswap swapfile
  # swapon swapfile

See Chapter 95 for further details on swap. Next:

  $ df -k .

Anything greater than 400,000 kB available is good. Next:

df -k /

Anything above 4,000,000 kB available is good. If you have less, delete some files, grow your root partition, buy a new hard drive, or install to a different partition (which means deviating from this guide.)