[ On Tuesday, April 17, 2001 at 09:21:11 (+0900), Henry Nelson wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: installing with sysinst on small (4MB, i386) systems....
>
> All I know is that I was able to install on a 4MB 386 with "tiny",
> but "small" never worked.  This was 1.4.2.

That's sort of my point.

Right now the "INSTALL_SMALL" kernel has ISA SCSI drivers in it, which
is mostly what makes it too big for 4MB machines, but I'm not sure if
there are any 4MB machines with only SCSI drives and if a normal INSTALL
based floppy set will still work on any machine with 8MB or more (I
think it will, though I haven't tested this recently), why bother with
INSTALL_SMALL?  (Whether this will still be true in another year or two
is a different question -- I fully expect quite a bit more kernel bloat,
even for install kernels, so perhaps it won't be.)

I've got an old SCSI-only 386 server that I suppose might be tested with
only 4MB, but it had 8MB in it when I got it, is easily upgraded with
30-pin SIMMs, and it would be insane to try and use it for anything with
only 4MB anyway.

In any case I think it's more important to have separate laptop and
desktop install sets for "small" (i.e. 4MB) systems since they have very
real and radical differences in what network cards can be supported by
the hardware (unless you start counting docking stations as "laptops"
too).  Older laptops are also usually a lot harder to add memory to.
(Does anyone have any spare RAM that might work in an old 486 commodore
laptop? :-)

Hmmm... I guess I should test an install on that old 386 server with
just 8MB of RAM (it's a Convergen/Unisys box).  I might even be able to
put it to use as it has a beefy enough power supply to drive the four or
five full-height scsi drives which I happen to have handy (if indeed the
siop driver will find the NCR chip on its motherboard).  Maybe it can do
RAID!.  Rumour has it that there are even Linux drivers for the
multi-port serial boards I have for it.  It would make a good test bed
for installs on older machines anyway.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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