I've got a little better now. found the alt F9 console in linuxrc to test memory I did the following, monitoring the process from aF9 and aF2 unplug all what was not strictly necessary (cd, net, even mouse and floppy-all but the AC plug :-) lauch install. directly from the copied cd (no need to have two linux.initrd, the /boot/loader ones are nice) in linuxrc (the small text interface we know for ages), remove all the unwanted modules (pcmcia, usb, scsi...) the 77Mo of physical ram are just no enough for the system to rum. approx 15Mb cached in swap. total activated swap : 2x200Mo for a total of 400Mo. most stay free. only text install expert partitionning->y give a 2Gb partition to yast. Yast insists to have a third swap (?) I let it go. a little dependency problem to solve manually (in yast) and the instal runs. so total 550Mb swap 35Mo used when I look at it (but may be much more at some times). to be continued :-) Rules SUSE!!! I hope anybody understand I try to push SUSE Linux on it's edge, not for default use :-) jdd -- http://www.dodin.net http://dodin.org/galerie_photo_web/expo/index.html http://lucien.dodin.net http://fr.susewiki.org/index.php?title=Gérer_ses_photos