Installing from 5.25-Inch Floppy Disks

Linux prefers to be installed from a 3.5-inch disk drive. However, it is possible to install on a machine that has only a 5.25-inch drive. This isn’t as easy as installing from a 3.5-inch drive, but if you install off of your hard drive it may actually be easier.

The first three disks of Slackware Linux, the A disks, should all fit within a 1.2MB diskette. To install them, you’ll need a boot kernel and a rootdisk. To make the boot-kernel disk, copy the boot kernel of your choice to a floppy using the UNIX command dd or RAWRITE.EXE. To make the rootdisk, write color.gz, text.gz, umsdos.gz, or tape.gz to a floppy in the same way. (These are in /ROOTDSKS.)

Use the boot-kernel disk to boot the rootdisk, and then install from there. This will load the ramdisk. Once you have the slackware: prompt you can remove the disk from your machine and continue with the installation.

Once you’ve got the base system installed, you can install the rest of the disks by downloading them on to your hard drive and installing them from there. Disk series other than A won’t fit onto 1.2MB disks.

Installing from Tape

The TAPE.GZ rootdisk file can be used to install Slackware96 from tape. This has been tested on a Colorado Jumbo 250, but it should work for most floppy tape and SCSI tape drives. To do this, you’ll need to know a little about UNIX and its filesystem.

Any of the boot-kernel disks will work for floppy tape support. If you’re installing from a SCSI drive, make sure you use a boot kernel with SCSI support.

You need to have a blank MS-DOS formatted disk ready to store the install scripts and installation defaults. The installation uses two tape passes—one to read these files from the tape and the second to do the actual installation. Once you’ve written the files from the first tape pass to your floppy, you won’t need to scan those files again if you install from the same tape in the future.

The tape must be written in GNU tar format (or in a compatible block size with some other tar). This is the command that would write out the tape, assuming you’re sitting in a directory set up like /pub/linux/slackware on ftp.cdrom.com:

     tar cv {a?,ap?,d?,d1?,e?,f?,k?,n?,t?,tcl?,x?,x1?,xap?,xd?,xv?,y?}/*

This ensures that the files are written to the tape in the proper order.

You must set your TAPE variable first, like these lines in the .profile file under bash:

     TAPE=/dev/nrft0

     export TAPE

Unlike installing from floppy disks, you don’t need to install all the *.tgz files, or even all the directories. The only requirement is that base.tgz be the first package (*tgz file) written to the tape.

This method isn’t fully guaranteed to work.

Installing When RAM is Very Tight

Installation can be tricky on a machine with 4 megabytes or less of RAM. Here are a few tricks that can be helpful if you run into problems. (Some of the symptoms of low memory might include system hangs while booting the bootdisk; root password required on the rootdisk; and an inability to run fdisk or mkswap.)

It’s still possible to install Linux in this situation by avoiding the use of a ramdisk during installation. Normally the entire rootdisk image is loaded into memory before installation begins; this uses 1440K of RAM, a sizable chunk on a machine with only 4096K (and probably less available) in the first place. To save this memory for Linux, you’ll need to prepare a decompressed rootdisk and use it to install.

First, you’ll want to prepare a directory for the various files you’ll need to decompress the rootdisk image and write it to a floppy. Under DOS, create a directory with the MKDIR command. The name of the directory doesn’t matter; in the following examples we’ve arbitrarily chosen SLACK as the name of the directory:

     C:> MKDIR SLACK

You’ll then want to copy the appropriate files from the CD-ROM to the SLACK directory. We’ll start with GZIP.EXE (needed to decompress the image file) and RAWRITE.EXE (needed to write the decompressed image to floppy disk). In the following example, we assume the CD-ROM drive is represented by the drive letter E:. If your drive uses a different letter, use that instead.

     C:> COPY E:\INSTALL\GZIP.EXE C:\SLACK

     C:> COPY E:\INSTALL\RAWRITE.EXE C:\SLACK

Next, select an appropriate rootdisk image from the E:\ROOTDSKS directory on the CD-ROM and copy it to the C:\SLACK directory. In this example we’ll use the COLOR.GZ image:

     C:> COPY E:\ROOTDSKS\COLOR.GZ C:\SLACK

Now we need to use GZIP.EXE to decompress the image. Execute these commands to change into the SLACK directory and decompress the rootdisk image:

     C:> CD \SLACK

     C:\SLACK> GZIP -D COLOR.GZ