Keith Moore writes:
> I've had this problem also.  The 1.3 install disk has a compressed
> image of the file system that contains the tools needed to install the
> kernel.  These are uncompressed into ramdisk, which eats up a lot of
> the memory in a 4 Mb machine.

That's why we have special boot-small disks for such machines, but I
must admit that even the boot-small kernel might not be svelte enough
to permit a reasonable install.

> It would be nice if the install procedure had the option, for small
> memory machines, to uncompress the tools onto the swap partition of a
> hard disk and use that instead of a ramdisk.  (or maybe just the
> ability to add some swap space before installing...)

The difficulty here is that the tools you need for creating a swap
partition and such are in the ramdisk to begin with. If you last long
enough to complete partitioning, however, a swapctl could be run
without any trouble.

In general, the desire to have friendly tools and the desire to run in 
4MB is starting to conflict more and more on the i386 port. This will
only get worse. I'm not sure what a reasonable long term solution is.

Perry