Steven,
I tried booting the Slackware 8.0 kernels that would support my Trantor T130B
SCSI, but nothing good to report. I even tried DOSBOOTing the generic
diagnostic NetBSD kernel, but it hung without really diagnosing anything that
the installation kernel or generic (not diagnostic) kernel could. Now being
unable to install any of the quasi-Unix OSes, I might create another 255 MB DOS
partition, which will leave about 572 MB. This third DOS partition is mainly to
copy stuff to a new computer due to ill health of the Iomega Zip 250 drive.
This stuff consists of DJGPP and DOS port of GUN Emacs, a big fat 140 or maybe
160 MB. DOS is the least efficient OS for handling big partitions.
from Steven:
S> I have been considering going to an 8meg ramdisk, but
that would limit BasicLinux to computers with 16meg
RAM or more. I think there is probably more potential
in going to a loop filesystem (which is stored as an
image file on the user's DOS/win9 partition).
I think some Linux distributions use this idea of an image file on a DOS or
Win9x/ME partition. Be offered a personal version of BeOS that could be
installed to a 500 (?) MB image file on a Windows partition.
S> Slackware gives you a lot of choices about what you install
and what you don't, so you can certainly make a slimmer
installation than this. If I were you, I would start off
with the Slackware base set (say 50meg) and use it for a
while before adding anything else. That way you have a
clearer idea of what you need and what you don't. Besides
with only 20meg RAM, those fancy GUI desktops aren't going
to perform so well.
With 20 MB RAM, KDE and GNOME would be hard-pressed to crawl, let alone run.
But I should have 572 MB not allowing for swap partition. Use a swap file?
One person asked what NIC is, and I forgot to answer a couple days ago:
Network Interface Card
