specs:

Toshiba Satellite 105CS
Pentium 75MHz
8 MB Ram
500 MB Harddrive
Floppy drive
NO CDROM

what i did so far:

i downloaded the lates DSL iso.. extracted it, then rar'ed them into 34 1.4mb floppy sized files..

on the laptop, i created one primary and one logical DOS partition, each consisting of 50 MB.. then i moved all the rar's (painstakingly..) to the D drive.. unrar'ed the knoppix folder to my C drive.. deleted the D drive.. then made the DSL bootdisk and ran DSL.

problem:

first problem encountered was a long stall when searching for a scsi device.. which i easily solved by typing "dsl noscsi" at the boot: prompt. however, it tries to load everything into the RAM, which i don't have much of (8 MB), and gives me an error saying it ran out of memory. i need to get DSL running, so i can go into the shell and do a hdinstall. i have tried the mode where you specify the drive (it was under the f2 options), but that failed me as well (i recreated the logical partition with the remaining disk space at drive D and assumed it would be labeled /dev/hda2). i am not sure if this is the right way to do a hdinstall when using the floppy to boot. i want to install DSL permanently to my hd and have it boot everytime i reboot without any bootdisks.

solutions??

p.s. can someone also explain this "swap" business? i'm not exactly sure what that means.. or how it would work.

Does your Toshiba have a NIC? If so, and you have another linux box on hand to use as a host, you might want to try a NFS (or other network) install.

Copy the iso to something like /install on the host. Create a network boot floppy for your Toshiba, then point install to the /install partition on the host. Make sure NFS is up on the host. You can also use http or ftp. Same procedure.

I also sometimes use one other method to copy files onto my likewise CD-less and floppy-less Twinhead. I picked up a 2GB USB drive at a flea market for $10, and use the guts of the USB device to load the Twinhead's HD. 4 screws takes out the 2GB drive from the USB box, 2 more screws gets me the Twinhead's HD, then swap and use the USB guts and another system to load the Twinhead's HD.

A swap partition is used to swap data in and out of RAM. Your swap partition should be about the same as your system RAM, but not more than 120MB (this will no doubt start a raging debate about how to properly size a swap). In your case, I suggest double the RAM size, or 16MB.

Hope this helps out some...

i don't have a network card.. or a running OS for that matter xP