Hello,
I just successfully installed Puppy Linux 1.0.7 to a 486 with 24 megabytes of RAM and I just wanted to share how I got this to work. The normal way of booting puppy from CD-ROM would not work with the amount of memory I had. This is my procedure for getting things to work on a low memory setup. Here's the basic concept: Instead of accessing the initrd from the ram upon boot, I had the computer access it from a 'scratch' disk partition, thus saving tons of RAM. While I haven't tried it, I think it might be possible to use this procedure with even less RAM. This is also a nice work-around if your computer does not support booting from a CD-ROM. This post requires some technical understanding. Here's my procedure:
Required tools:
HAL91 Linux boot floppy
Windows 98/ME startup disk (with CD-ROM support)
Puppy Linux 1.0.7 CD-ROM
Loadlin (an MS-DOS utility to boot linux with kernel parameters)
1) Use HAL91 to partition your hard disk with "fdisk /dev/hda". I assume you are using /dev/hda for your hard disk. You will need one large main partition, a swap partition, a 12-megabyte scratch partition, and a general file copy/store partition. I recommend putting the latter three in an extended partition. Make sure your swap partition has plenty of space and has its type set to 82. Also, Puppy will not boot properly if you don't have some general partition for it to dump temporary 'stuff' to. I set the type of my main partition to an arbitrary 64 so puppy wouldn't see it. Format your general partition with ext2 so you and Puppy will have some place to work with files. And format the swap-space for use. "mke2fs /dev/hda#" & "mkswap /dev/hda#". I partitioned in a way that the swap partition, the scratch partition and the general partition were consecutive, so I could later delete them and replace them with one larger swap partition.
Here's my partition layout:
Code: Select all
Partition Kind Type Size What
------------------------------------------------------------------
hda1 [unformatted] 64 [all remaining space] Main
hda2 extended 5 128MB Extended
hda5 [unformatted] 64 12MB Scratch
hda6 ext2 83 52MB General
hda7 swap 82 64MB Swap
3) Dump Puppy's initial ramdisk to your 12-megabyte scratch partition. "dd if=image of=/dev/hda#" This is the actual RAM saver. Instead of loading the initial ram disk to ram, you load it to your scratch partition
4) Boot from a windows startup disk and use loadlin to boot Puppy: "loadlin D:\vmlinuz root=/dev/hda5 PFILE=pup001-none-262144". Here, I assumed D:\ for the CD-ROM and /dev/hda5 for the scratch partition; make the appropriate changes. (There should be enough free space to install loadlin to the Windows startup disk. If not, you can put it on a separate floppy and access it with B:\. This will even work if you don't have two floppy drives; you will just be prompted to insert the second disk.)
5) Puppy comes up just fine. Now you can do a hard drive install over your main partition.
6) Replace the extended partition with swap space. (You can reboot into Hal91 to do this.)
7) Follow the directions here to see to it that Puppy will in fact use your swap partition when you boot the system without the CD-ROM. http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=4591
What I've learned from this: If you try persistently at a hopeless cause, it pays off!
I hope my hours of trial and error helps someone; enjoy!
Juz10mac