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There is a very nice guide on the wiki (now static html)

Yes there is a very nice guide on the Wiki - what it doesn't mention is that the script doesn't do the Lilo stuff correctly, so you are left with a full installation on your hard drive, but no way of booting into it. Hence what I wrote above.

I did a lot of searching and found that everybody who had tried a full HDD install had run into the same proble, and most gave up after coming across the "gotchas" such as having to specifically mount the system partition with the "dev" option.

I just tried that on my system and it doesn't seem to be able to find the dsl repository to do that. Does anyone know where to set this, and what I should set it to?

Thanks in advance!!

Bearing in mind that i am using the last DSL stable release from 2008...

Has anyone managed to get an Emacs or Microemacs editor running on a modest DSL setup? I have only 32 MB RAM to play with, but I suspect all Emacses should run within that...

Is it a case of doing a simple apt-get... I really want a system with full coloured syntax highlighting.

I have managed to install and run, with coloured syntax highlighting, the vi_full.dsl package, but it took a lot of messing with.

I am OK with that, but I much prefer Emacs to work with - it was the very first text editor I ever used.

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.