Installation can be tricky on a machine with 4 megabytes of RAM or less. Here are a few tricks that can be helpful if you run into problems. (Symptoms might include: system hangs while booting the bootdisk; root password required on the rootdisk; inability to run "fdisk" or "mkswap"; and many more, I'm sure...) First, you'll need to use a 3.5" floppy for the rootdisk, and you *must* uncompress the rootdisk before writing it out. This is since it will be used directly from the floppy drive instead of loaded into a ramdisk. 1. If you have a second 3.5" floppy drive, great -- you'll want to use that for the rootdisk. If not, you'll have to make due with the rootdisk in your boot drive. With the rootdisk in the boot drive you won't be able to install from floppy disks or make a bootdisk at the end of the installation process, since the disk will be "mounted" in the boot drive and cannot be removed (no matter what the screen tells you) until the machine is rebooted. Make a rootdisk using RAWRITE.EXE for the floppy drive you selected. 2. Unzip lodlin16.zip (look in /kernels) in a directory on your DOS partition. 3. Select an appropriate kernel from a subdirectory under /kernels. The /bootdsks.144/WHICH.ONE document might be helpful in selecting the proper one for your hardware. Copy it into the directory where you put loadlin. 4. Put the rootdisk (NOT write protected) into the floppy drive, and use this command to boot it: loadlin scsi.s root=/dev/fd0 ramdisk=0 ^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^ |||||| This should be the drive you put the disk in. This is the name of the kernel you selected. Then, install Linux. If you're using the boot floppy drive for the rootdisk, you will not be able to install from floppy disks. DON'T take the rootdisk out of the floppy drive for any reason during the installation! Also, since scratch files may be written to the rootdisk, you'll want to start with a fresh copy if you need to start over for some reason. Once installed, you'll need to have a way to start your new system. If you were lucky enough to have a second floppy drive to use for your rootdisk, then you'll be able to make a bootdisk at the end of the installation process. This is highly recommended. If your boot drive is occupied by the rootdisk, then you've got two options: Loadlin (a method of booting from DOS) or LILO. And, if you're using the UMSDOS filesystem then Loadlin is your only choice. To boot the system with loadlin, you'll use a command similar to the one you used to start the rootdisk, but you'll replace /dev/fd0 or /dev/fd1 with the name of the device you're using for your root Linux partition, like this: loadlin scsi root=/dev/hda2 ramdisk=0 Once your machine is up and running, you'll probably need to add additional driver support if you have extra hardware (such as an ethernet card) that's not supported by the kernel you've used to install. You can do this one of two ways: 1) Recompile your kernel to include any additional support needed. or 2) Load any extra kernel drivers you need from kernel modules. To do this, edit your /etc/rc.d/rc.modules file. You can think of this file as sort of the Linux equivalent of DOS's CONFIG.SYS file -- it contains examples for all of the most commonly used modules. Pat