This section covers creating a swap partition and a temporary root partition on the laptop's hard disk. Nothing here is Slackware-specific.
If you are going to use only muLinux to for this procedure then you need to prepare a disk with mkfs.ext2 and supporting libraries on it. From the muLinux setup files uncompress USR.bz2 and mount it as a loop file-system. If you are in the same directory as the USR file and you want to mount it as /tmpusr then the sequence for this is: .:: docs.google.com ::.
losetup /dev/loop0 USR mount -t ext2 /dev/loop0 /tmpusr
>From there copy mkfs.ext2, libext2fs.so.2, libcomerr.so.2 and libuuid.so.1 onto a floppy.
Select the root disk you want - I used the color one with no problems but the text one would be slightly faster in these low memory conditions. Uncompress the image and mount it as a loop device. The procedure is the same as in the above section but the root disk image is a minix file-system.
Next you need 3 1722 floppies or 4 1440 floppies with ext2 file-systems - it's better with 1722 disks as you don't need to split the /lib directory. Give one floppy twice the default number of inodes so it can take the /dev directory. That's 432 nodes for a 1722 disk or 368 for a 1440. If you specify /dev/fd0H1722 or /dev/fd0H1440 then you don't have to give any other parameters so for a 1722 disk do .:: xbato.com ::.
mke2fs -N 432 /dev/fd0H1722
If you have mounted the root image as /tmproot and the destination floppy as /floppy then cd to /tmproot. To copy the dev directory the command is
cp -dpPR dev/* /floppy/
For the other directories with files in (bin, etc, lib, mnt, sbin, usr, var) it's
cp -dpPr directoryname/* /floppy/
Don't bother with the empty ones (floppy, proc, root, tag, tmp) because you can simply create them on the laptop. boot and cdrom are soft links pointing to /mnt/boot and /var/log/mount respectively - you can also create them on the laptop.
To save space, small-Linux designers sometimes use older libc5 librariesand where they do use up-to-date libc6 they leave out may of the options compiled into full distributions, including some optional features of the ext2 file-system. This has two consequences: .:: adbritedirectory.com ::.
If installing on an Aero, make sure the floppy drive is inserted before switching on and do not remove it.
With muLinux, wait until the boot-process complains about the small memory space and offers the option of dropping into a shell - take that option and work in the limited single-user mode it gives you.