drg says

What if one uses gparted or any other partitioner to set the /swap on the HD beforehand?

Not sure if older gparted will make a difference or not. I have a older live iso of Gparted circa a few years older than current release that uses Fluxbox desktop with only Gparted program as the only program on the Iso. No file manager, internet, etc.....

I use it to partition via gui when nothing else will boot on old gear except for Damn Small Linux which uses cfdisk for partitioning. I guess you are using cfdisk or fdisk for type 82 file swap partition making. Tedious I know


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I never checked how gparted identified swap after making swap with cfdisk and that Laptop is sold and gone now. Closest thing I have to those specs is old old first ever made Notebook. Pentium P66hz,
12MB of ram, Not sure about Hardrive size but it is small (probably in MBs), Ball mouse on deck with mouse clicks on side of notebook casing at r/h angle from keypad deck, running Windows 95. And it is a Notebook with a power supply as big as some red bricks.
Gathering Dust for now. Still powers up and holds a charge though. I should take a picture of it and post it. Hoping it becomes a antique collectors item I guess.

rokytnji, thanks for urls and suggestions. Good reminder of other low ram/low cpu options. DSL does work on this P133/48MB ram, etc.
I'm just wondering if antiX-486-core or -base care about it. Only way is to play. Probably no difference if swap is from cfdisk, fdisk or gparted (as used in antiX-full).

Hmm. Rokytnji's mention of DSL has got me thinking of a workaround for boxes, like these P1's I'm testing, to be able to use floppies, where there is no usb card. I have been unable to mount floppies using any antiX-486 series on the P166, and have been trying variations of entries in eg etc/fstab, /mnt/floppy, /media/floppy. Always get"does not exist".

The DSL cd can be booted up from their floppy-to-cd floppy, and used as a livecd, which can use serial mice and mount floppies and mount the HD (with antiX-486-whatever version). DSL uses kernel 2.4.x. Why? Simply to copy small files from the floppy to the HD, eg xkbset (so I can use the mousekey feature).

Question:
The mounting works, but when I try to copy a file from floppy to HD, I cannot. Something about permissions. Have searched DSL sites for hint/help, but so far found none for this method. Any ideas?
A livecd using eg mepis or antix would work, but not with eg 48 M ram.

edit: The DSL bootfloppy is named something more like dsl-from-cd, also there's a dsl-from-usb. edit#2: I meant"/media/floppy", not"/mount/floppy". Corrected above text.

Any ideas?

Been awhile since I played with DSL. Long Shot Idea. I haven't ran DSL since 2 years ago.

Since permission issue. How about opening Rox in DSL as Root user through terminal

Find the floppy in Rox (I'd look in /mnt or /media maybe) while in root and copy and paste files to hardrive then.

Like I said. Longshot idea. Wish I could be more use to you.

DSL livecd workaround works for the P166, 48M ram.

Booted with the DSL bootfloppy dsl from cd, “lowram” option, which boots the DSL 4.4.10 cd. NB: this is a 2.4.3 kernel, so serial mouse is supported.

As rok wisely suggested, I tried this (so obvious):

Opened term. Typing “sudo su” makes one superuser/root.
Then “emelfm” opens the filemanager as root, a two panel setup like MC.

Note that left click/right click brings up the various options eg open, mount, unmount, view.

On one panel, you are in “/”. Navigate to “/mnt”, then to “auto”, mount “floppy”, voila.
On other panel, navigate to “hda1“ (worked for me), mount it.

Copy from floppy to HD worked as I wanted/needed.

Now you can browse, view, copy, delete, etc., even open files on the HD if DSL apps support it.
DSL cd has more hints for other possibilities in “Help”. Nice little distro. Recommend it if the apps suit your needs, which it certainly did for me. 'tho it is certainly not debian squeeze.
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Also tried slitaz loram cd, which also worked as a livecd, but no serial mouse support. Also nice distro, etc.

Just some hints re more current versions (these are testing ones as of early Jan , 2011). Antix marches on. Or I missed this before.

antiX--M11-core-pt1-486 works fine as a livecd. It mounts HDD or USB flash, views, edits. inxi. Nice!

antiX-M11-base-pt1-486 will run as live CD with 64M ram, if cheatcode-juggling or the full fail-safe option is used on this high-end P1, and an active swap (maybe without active swap). So, one can use gparted from the gui with 64M ram!
With this –base-pt1-486, until the fluxbox menu has been configured (hints are there), leafpad or gparted needed to be invoked from rox-filer or ‘run’