> Unfortunately, even when I installed a big disk and made a huge swap
> partition, I got the same UVM out of memory messages
>
> /sbin/ping -c <my nameserver's IP address> UVM: pid 13 (sysinst), uid 0 killed: out of swap
>
> UVM: pid 47 (ping), uid 0 killed: out of swap.
>
> So, it seems the problem is that it's not possible to do a 1.4
> install with boot-tiny.fs onto a 4 MB system?

Hm, this is after the disk has been partitioned, right?

I suspect that sysinst has not been taught to (conditionally?)
turn on swapping on the newly partitioned disk before continuing
the installation job (I've talked about this needing to be done
but just have not gotten around to it...).  Some things Just Wont
Fit in 4MB, although at the time I concocted boot-tiny, the
problem (at that point "hang") happened when gunzip was being run
as part of the gzip+tar file extraction process.

You can therefore try the following workaround: before getting to
the above point, please suspend sysinst (^z), do "swapctl -a
/dev/wd0b" (or whatever your newly partitioned disks swap
partition is called), "fg %1" and proceed with the installation,
which should now progress, albeit a bit slowly.

One other thing you should be aware of is that the default
GENERIC kernel which is part of kern.tgz (and which will be
unpacked for you by default) will not run on a 4M machine.
Instead you should use a kernel built from GENERIC_TINY.  I see
that the 1.4 release does not contain this binary (it probably
should) -- holler if you need one and I can compile one for you.

Regards,

- H=E5vard