In message <Pine.NEB.4.44.0210041349310.2573-100000@maxine.cjones.org>, Carrie 
Jones writes:
>many thanks also to Brian Stark and Manuel Bouyer who helped. Now it
>begins booting and seems to be going along fine until it gets to here:
>
>(** means kernel output)
>
>**root file system type: ffs
>Fri Oct  4 19:44:05 GMT 2002
>**UVM: pid 10 (sh), uid 0 killed: out of swap
>Killed
>**UVM: pid 13 (sh), uid 0 killed: out of swap
>Killed
>Starting File system checks:
>**UVM: pid 15 (sh), uid 0 killed: out of swap
>Killed
>Unknown error:help!
>**UVM: pid 14 (sh), uid 0 killed: out of swap
>Killed
>**UVM: pid 6 (sh), uid 0 killed: out of swap
>**UVM: pid 16 (sh), uid 0 killed: out of swap
>Oct  4 19:44:37 init:/bin/sh on /etc/rc terminiated abnormally, going
>to single user mode
>
>And then it hangs.  This is a ten finger copy, so please
>excuse my fumble fingers. Any ideas?


It means just what it says -- there's not enough swap space.  And I 
assume you have little RAM, so it does need to swap.

The best answer is to repartition the disk, which would mean starting 
your installation over again...  If you don't want to do that, you can 
*probably* create a large file (say, /usr/SWAP), mode 600, and add it 
to /etc/fstab as a swap device.  If you do that, you should be ok, 
assuming that you have enough swap area to get that far.  Swapping to 
files is enabled comparatively late in the boot process, and if you're 
having problems on pid 10 I don't know if you're getting that far.
You can work around that, but it may take some playing with rc.d 
scripts.

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb (me)
		http://www.wilyhacker.com ("Firewalls" book)