Specifications

I wouldn't recommend adding to this − if anything, prune it back to A, AP and N. That gives you a core
Linux setup to which you can add according to your needs.
Install
Choose the Expert installation method. This allows you to select/reject for installation individual packages
from the categories you chose in the Selection step. Appendix A goes through the precise choices I made .
This part takes about 3 hours for a PCMCIA network install. You are prompted to select individual packages
before the installation of each category, so you can't just walk away and leave it to run through.
Configure
Once the packages are all installed, you are prompted to do final configuration for your machine. This covers
areas like networking, Lilo, selecting a kernel etc. Some points to look out for:
• If you did a PCMCIA install, don't accept the offer to configure your network with netconfig. This
will ruin your pcmcia networking. Wait until you've rebooted and then edit /etc/pcmcia/network.opts
• This is the point where you should install a kernel. For a laptop the bareapm kernel is best, for a
desktop simply the bare one.
Exit
The set−up process is finished but you are not. Do not reboot yet! There is another vital step to complete.
5.5 Pre−reboot Configuration
On a normal machine you would simply reboot once the installation is complete. If you do that here you may
have to wait 6 or 8 hours for a login prompt to appear and another half hour to get to the command prompt.
Before rebooting you need to change or remove the elements that cause this slowdown. This involves editing
config files so you need to be familiar with vi, ed or sed.
At this stage your future root partition is still mounted as /mnt so remember to at that to the paths given here.
/etc/passwd
Edit this to change root's login shell to ash. ash really is the only practical login shell for 4mb
RAM.
/etc/rc.d/rc.modules
Comment out the line 'depmod −a'. You only need to update module dependencies if you
have changed your module configuration (recompiled or added new ones, for example). On a
standard system it only takes a second or two and so it doesn't matter that it's needlessly
performed each time. On a 4mb laptop it can take as much as 8 hours. When you do change
your module set−up you can simply uncomment this line and reboot. Alternatively, change
4mb−Laptops
Install 12