I wanted to resurrect an old Hi-Grade Notino laptop of 1998 vintage, using Linux, but despite a reasonably beefy AMD K-6(2) processor running at nearly 400 MHz. this little machine only has 32 MB of RAM. Puppy wouldn't work well, and I was glad to find DSL, and wanted to do a full HD install. I chose the last stable release, 2008. After booting successfully by CD-ROM, and partitioning using CF-Disk (the little 4 GB drive was only really good for one main partition and a swap partition) I found an HD install script, which ran fine until it left me high and dry at the Lilo install stage, with a non-booting system. I googled extensively, and found lots of people giving up after reaching the same stage. I googled even more and slowly dealt with each new problem but kept on coming against another obstacle, including one "gotcha!" that requires an uber-geek to spot (which thankfully one did mention). Finally I got it working.
Is it worthwhile my doing a tutorial on this, or was there a much better way that I missed, having put in a lot of effort for nothing?
Here are some cursory notes. If it is worthwhile, I might put these into a more informative form.
You can install DSL to hard drive. I've done it, but it is not easy. It needed a lot of google detective work.
You have to do the dsl-hdinstall script till it finishes. That leaves you with DSL on the hard drive. You need to mount the hard drive "mount -o dev /dev/hda1" because otherwise lilo won't install (that's a real "gotcha!") Then copy the lilo.conf off the CD onto the hard drive. Before running lilo - you need to "chroot /mnt/hda1 /bin/bash" so that lilo thinks the root directory is on your hard drive partition, not on the install CD any more.Edit lilo.conf so it works for the new system, run lilo and it works. It will now boot off the HD.