Slack8 rootdisk too small for install (3.6MB)

[MBMarduk]

I've been trying this for 18 hours now: install on a not-so-old laptop.

It's a P120 with 16MB RAM and 810MB HDD.
'Cept the floppy and CD drive share the same bay and CD-booting isn't supported.

So everything goes fine until it's time to install the packages: after about 4 packages in the 'a1'-series it tells me my / directory is full.
And indeed it is; it's the goddamn rootdisk of 3.6MB the different dirs in / get filled up while installing stuff.

I've tried by succesfully symlinking /var and /usr on the large HDD so as to lighten the burden on the ramdisk but to no avail.

Can anyone help me?
TIA,
-Mike

[MBMarduk]

bump

[bdg1983]

I'll bite...

Does Slackware 8 support installing from dos?

If so, then create a small (i.e. 10MB) dos partition at the beginning of the drive while retaining the rest of the drive as ext2 and the swap partition.

Install dos and then the boot utilities from Slack with cd drivers etc. to start the install from the cdrom.

It should be doable.

Or ???

dd the i/p floppy disk image and whatever you need to a small partition again at the beginning of the drive, set the partition active and boot from there with the install cd loaded in the drive.

There could be docs on the install cd for this, at Slacks site or possibly at www.linuxdoc.org (http://www.linuxdoc.org)

Hope it helps.

[MBMarduk]

MDwatts: I *was* going to try the "4MB Laptop-HOWTO" on linuxdoc.org when you suggested it. (I must've forgotten it) THX.

For others doing a FORUM SEARCH in the future:

During SETUP I tried something else that DID work.
Instead of selecting "Install from a pre-mounted partition" I tried "Install from a hard drive partition", which did work.
(or was it the other way around?)
I don't see the relevant difference between these two, but it worked.

Now it didn't install to /dev/ram0 anymore but correctly to /dev/hda1.
:confused:

[Malakin]

why not just do a network install? ftp/nfs

[MBMarduk]

Originally posted by idealego:
<STRONG>why not just do a network install? ftp/nfs</STRONG>

The SETUP utility doesn't support FTP (AFAICS) and I don't know any NFS IPs...so.