> For some reason, this old 486 I have runs out of memory when
> trying to create the filesystem on ramdisk. (It has 4M, which
> should be enough I think.)

No, 4M is barely enough for the kernel and ramdisk, if even that, much
less leave you any RAM to run programs in.  RedHat asks for 8M to install,
minimum, and needs it.

> I thought there was a way to tell the installation not to use the ramdisk, 
> but instead use another floppy?

If you mean to actually run with the root filesystem on a floppy, that's
not possible for RedHat now.  For many versions their installation setup's
root filesystem has been bigger than a floppy (for a while, you needed 2
floppies for the root disk, until somebody added the ability to read a
compressed root filesystem into the ramdisk).  It may be possible to copy
RedHat's root filesystem to some other device, if you have another computer
available, and give lilo the appropriate parameters to load it and not use
a ramdisk, but I am not sure how you'd go about it.

Some of the distributions can get around this problem by loading a very
tiny root ramdisk which mostly has only the barest essentials to start the
system, with the rest of the stuff incorporated via symlinks to a cdrom.
The latest Linux Journal has a big chart comparing distributions and it
appears that Debian, SuSE, and Slackware all have this ability, but not
RedHat.

/dev/joe
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