OBSOLETE ROOT-INSTALL FLOPPY IMAGES These are a.out 1.44 megabyte rootdisk images from Slackware 3.4. For various reasons, these images are now considered obsolete and unsupported. But, they still might be useful in some situations -- for example, they can fit on a floppy disk uncompressed, which allows you to actually mount them as a root filesystem. This saves a *lot* of memory as compared to the rootdisks used with Slackware 3.5 and later. Slackware supported installation on systems with only 4 megabytes for as long as it was really possible. When it was discovered that the Linux kernel has grown to the point where the smallest one included with Slackware won't boot on a 4 meg machine, I decided that it was probably time to abandon that cause. All other Linux distributions require a minimum of 8 megabytes of RAM, and have been that way for quite a while. And, using a larger ramdisk was a necessity for switching them to an ELF format (and later glibc). So, if you've got a machine with 4 megabytes and can't install, I apologize. If you get your hands on an old bootdisk or kernel (or maybe if you can find someone who will compile the smallest kernel they can for you) then maybe these rootdisks will help you install. Otherwise, you might want to get some more RAM. Here's a description of the obsolete rootdisks available in this directory: color.gz: A root-install disk using an easy-to-use new full-screen color install program. NOTE: This version of the install system is not forgiving of extra keystrokes entered between screens, so type carefully. umsdos.gz: A version of the color install disk using UMSDOS - a filesystem that allows you to install Linux into a directory on an existing MS-DOS partition. Not as fast as ext2 or xiafs, but it works, and you don't have to repartition your drive. See README.UMS for more information. text.gz: A root-install that uses text-based install scripts. This is actually preferred by some people since you can back up to look at error messages using Shift-PageUp. In addition, all of the new keymaps should be supported. tape.gz: A semi-experimental disk designed to support installation from tape. See the file README_T.APE for more information about this disk. rescue.gz: An old rescue rootdisk. About the only good thing about this rescue disk is that it's small... the utilities on it are pretty old, and they're all in a.out format and/or compressed. Like most of the rootdisks here, if you've got the memory to load them you're much better off with the newer rootdisks that are located one level up.