Installing Slackware 15.0 with little RAM

Slackware is a good distro for older PCs with lower resources, but there comes a point when there isn't enough RAM to boot into the installer's initrd. The lower limit for 14.2 was around 192MB, but with Slackware 15.0 that's grown to a whopping 320MB, which excludes a number of PCs which would otherwise run it reasonably well. However, the method here allows booting into the installation invironment with as little as 96MB of RAM - but you will want some swap space!

The basic method used is to simply create a small partition to which the initrd is extracted, then boot to that from the installation DVD, thereby avoiding the requirement to eat into a large chunk of RAM for the initrd. This partition will, for obvious reasons, need to remain untouched throughout the installation process, otherwise failure is assured. Follow the following steps:

• The first step is to partition the HDD, this can be done either using another PC or with any version of slackware or another distro that will boot on the PC concerned. The partition can be small, 128MB should be (just) enough.
• Next, the Slackware 15.0 installation DVD should be mounted (if the PC concerned can only take CDs, then you'll need to create ISOs and burn them to discs using the instructions provided with the release). Mount the partition you reated in the last step, then cd into it. Extract the initrd to this partition using the command xz -dc < /mnt/dvd/isolinux/initrd.img | cpio -idmv noting that you'll need to use the appropriate path depending on where you mounted the DVD.
• Now, boot from the Slackware 15.0 installation DVD (or CD), and at the ISOLINUX boot screen enter the boot command: huge.s root=/dev/sda4 initrd= again substituting the relevant partition into the command, and using hugesmp.s if required. Do not mount the root partition read only as this will prevent the installation environment working correctly.
• Partition the HDD according to your needs, but you must not make any changes to the partition containing your extracted initrd. You may need to reboot according to the previous step to ensure that the partition table is read properly for installation.
• Install Slackware as per the normal procedure, but don't do anything to the installation partition during installation, even assigning it to a mount point. Installation will be slow with low RAM. Note that with 96MB, even a very minimal installation will consume all of the available RAM when booting straight to the command line. You will need to be patient, and your HDD will need to be happy swapping!
• Happy low powered computing with a modern distro! :-)