I don't know if 8mb is as much trouble as 4mb machines. Mastodon,
which admittedly isn't the most feature-ridden distribution on the
planet, fits the whole kitchen sink installer [1] into approximately
7 mb of core (this is kernel + 2400k ramdisk + libc4 + pcmcia
modules + cardmgr + ksh) and a 1.44mb bootdisk; 4mb, on the other
hand, just barely fits the installer in before it runs out of memory
and performs the traditional Linux reenactment of a traveller
encountering a basilisk along the road.
>Since boot floppy creation is already for nerds only, one might
>bring back support for 4 MB machines. Slackware used to (still does?)
>let the user create and enable swap before starting the setup program.
Well, once you start up a shell and run a script to ask about firing
up swap, you've eaten as much core as you would have just dropping
directly into a moderately well-written installer program [2].
____
david parsons \bi/ though I don't think I'd want to install X11R6
\/ on a 4mb machine.
[1: Which, after a weekend of late-night hacking, installs, from CD,
without having to do any boot-time parameter tweaking, on a Sony
VAIO 505TS. I will now dance a little victory dance before...]
[2: ... I have to test and see if the system will still get the
installer loaded on my 4mb test systems.]
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