@fozztexx maybe not and I think there might be a different message, though 16 meg with no swap doesn't leave a lot of room after a 1-2mb kernel image and however much ramdisk the live system needs.
Alternatively, maybe disable all the prehiphrials (serial, parallel, maybe even the mouse if it's not trying to boot into X) to see if it's IRQ weirdness?
@huronbikes I was booting with `failsafe` which disables pretty much everything. When the kernel starts it says there's 13MB free, so the kernel and the ramdisk aren't taking up that much.
I tried doing `failsafe init=/bin/bash` but that didn't stop the ramdisk init script from running.
@fozztexx oh, I mean disable things in the BIOS so no resources get assigned (if there are 2 serial ports and a parallel port disabling them in the bios should free up 3 IRQs).
It also looks like there's built-in sound which given the vintage of the machine may be on the ISA bus internally and if so is probably using ISAPNP which always was a pain and doubly so in Linux.
FozzTexx
Andrew Golding