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. (Wow! Can you believe it? :^) 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 2.2.6 kernel is quite a bit larger than version 2.0 was, so you may also need to replace the default kernel with one from the kernels/bare.i/ or kernels/lowmem.i/ 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. NOTE: Since fourmeg.zip replaces /linux/--linux-.---, if you unzip fourmeg.zip on a ZipSlack installation that's had some use, you might lose file attributes (like long filename information) on files you've added to the topmost Linux directory (/, or the DOS \LINUX directory) since the installation. In general, this shouldn't be too big a problem -- just rename the files and reset the permissions if need be. You could also move them out of / from within Linux before you unzip fourmeg.zip in DOS/Windows. 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 Jul 30 19:04 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: /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=1024 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 /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: /swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0 Have fun! --- Patrick Volkerding volkerdi@mhd1.moorhead.msus.edu volkerdi@ftp.cdrom.com