Specifications

2.2 The Problem
The small hard disks and the lack of an internal floppy on the Aero make the installation more tricky than
normal but the real problem is the RAM. None of the current distributions has an installation disk that will
boot in 4mb, not even if the whole hard disk is a swap partition.
The standard installation uses a boot disk to uncompress a root−partition image (either from a second floppy
or from CD−ROM) into a ram−disk. The root−image is around 4mb in size. That's all the RAM available in
this scenario. Try it and it freezes while unpacking the root−image.
2.3 The Solution
The answer is to eliminate the ram−disk. If you can mount root on a physical partition you will have enough
memory to do the install. Since the uncompressed ram−disk is too big to fit on a floppy, the only place left is
on the hard disk of the laptop. The steps are:
1. Find something that will boot in 4mb ram and which can also create ext2 partitions.
2. Use it to create a swap partition and a small ext2 partition on the laptop's hard disk.
3. Uncompress the installation root−image and copy it onto the ext2 partition.
4. Boot the laptop from the installation boot−disk, pointing it at the ext2 partition on the hard disk.
5. The installation should go more or less as normal from here.
The only question was whether a distribution that wouldn't install (under normal circumstances) on the
laptops would run on them. The short answer is "Yes".
If you're an old Linux hand then that's all you need to know. If not, read on − some of the steps listed above
aren't as simple as they look.
3.Choices Made
This section describes the choices available, which options are practical, which ones I decided on and why.
3.1 What to use to create the initial root partition?
The best tool for this is a mini−Linux. There's a wide selection of small Linuces available on the net, but most
of them won't boot in 4mb RAM. I found two that will:
SmallLinux http://smalllinux.netpedia.net/
SmallLinux will boot in as little as 2mb RAM but its root disk can't be taken out of the drive,
which is a shame since otherwise it has everything we need (i.e. fdisk, mkswap and
mkfs.ext2). SmallLinux can create the needed partitions but can't be used to copy the root
partition.
4mb−Laptops
2.2 The Problem 5