Oh, hey... my Debian rant reminded me of something! I have Debian running on a 486-25 with 12MB of RAM. (Pause for laughter...) Okay. Now then. When I run dpkg (on its own, or via apt-get) it wants about 18M of RAM to work with. This causes a fair deal of thrashing, and if I just let it go, it takes about 30 minutes to install even the most basic package. My solution thus far is to use the NBD driver to mount a swap space over the network. This is actually faster because the swap and actual package install don't have to contend for precious HDD seek time, and I can install the most basic packages in about 10 minutes or so. Even so, it would be nice if it were a bit faster still. Anyone know what dpkg does with its RAM? Is it loading all the packges into memory to figure out dependencies and stuff? Any way to make it behave more efficiently? -Chuck