Introducing fourmeg.zip: fourmeg.zip is an add-on for ZipSlack which creates an 8 megabyte swap file in your \LINUX directory. This allows ZipSlack to boot on a machine that only has 4 megabytes of RAM. (at least it might...) Even if you have more RAM in your machine, you might still want to add this package. For example, you might need swap space if you add the X Window System to ZipSlack (see the FAQ.TXT for more information on this), and adding fourmeg.zip provides a nice example of how to make a Linux swap file. Note that the 2.4.31 kernel is quite a bit larger than previous kernels in ZipSlack, so you may also need to replace the default kernel with one from the kernels/bare.i/ or kernels/lowmem.i/ (although lowmem.i is severely limited) directories. See the FAQ.TXT for more information on selecting a different kernel (the Q/A about "What if the machine halts at boot"). Installing fourmeg.zip: To install fourmeg.zip, simply unzip the file in DOS/Windows on the same partition where you unzipped ZipSlack. (Be sure to unzip zipslack.zip FIRST!) It will overwrite a few files in \LINUX such as \linux\etc\fstab, and will add an 8 megabyte swap file. If you've only got 4 megabytes of RAM, you may also wish to disable any shadow RAM in your machine's BIOS settings to make the maximum amount of RAM available to Linux. How it works (for the technically curious): fourmeg.zip does the trick by adding this file to your Linux system: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8388608 Jun 12 19:43 swapfile This file is used for swap space. If you've got an 8 megabyte swap file and 4 megabytes of real RAM, then you'll have 12 megabytes of virtual memory available for Linux. This line in /etc/fstab tells the kernel to activate the swap space at boot time: /root/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0 As shipped, the file is mostly filled with zeroes, and this is why the fourmeg.zip file can be compressed so efficiently. :^) In fact, the file is generated from the /dev/zero device (a never-ending supply of zeros) using the 'dd' utility. It is then formatted using the 'mkswap' program. Here's how to make a swap file manually: dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1k count=8192 mkswap swapfile sync If you need a larger swapfile, simply increase the value of 'count'. To activate a swapfile manually, you can use 'swapon': swapon /root/swapfile Or, to have it made active with every boot, make sure there's a line for it in your /etc/fstab like this one: /root/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0 Have fun! --- Patrick Volkerding volkerdi@slackware.com