I also tried installing Ultimate MS-DOS 7 (the floppy by a YouTuber, not the Chinese DOS Union release) and FreeDOS this way. FreeDOS (USB image) booted, but wouldn't install to the USB with either the stock USB driver or the one off of VOGONS. Ultimate DOS (floppy image written straight to the CF card, no partition table) booted, but froze trying to load the USB driver.

LOADLIN from DOS instead of trying to mess with lilo?

I'm 99% sure basiclinux 3.5 is Slackware 4.0 based. I remember there being instructions of dual booting with dos via a lilo edit. I'll try to dig it up

has floppy image (2x 1.44mb disks!) and .zip file (2.8mb) distributions - A user used this method to get it installed to disk
There are also VirtualBox & QEMU virtual hard disk images
here it is:
https://web.archive.org/web/20141022100704/ht … nux_install.htm

Here is Basiclinux's site:
https://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/

Booting from DOS loopback or linux partition on hdd requirement's:
- Intel 386 or compatible (12.5mhz sx or a 386sx soc should do, its default 2.2.26 kernel is directly optimized for 80386's)
- 3mb RAM (??Is that when booted to "Busybox" WM & "JWM" DE??, IceWM option would need "more", likely 8mb++)
- DOS (or Windows 95/98 in DOS mode) &/OR post boot install to linux partition (see instruction link)
- Can dual boot (with DOS/Windows/Etc) with lilo edit
- lots of packages (all of slackware 4.0, but no later + some of its own packages)

+ If booting fully to a ram disk, it needs 12mb ram

I wish I could tell you the exact version of the one I have known to work, but a couple of decades back I had Monkey Linux, based on Slackware, running on MSDOS filesystem, on a 386sl20 machine with 4MB RAM, that one, you basically unzip it to a DOS HDD and launch it with loadlin...

All I can find now ...
https://projectdevolve.tripod.com/text/download.htm
https://archiveos.org/monkey/

I used to have Slackware installed on my 486 on a "UMSDOS" filesystem - it was a supported installation target and I learned about it from some of the bundled instructions. This is a compatibility layer built-in into Linux that stores unix files on a regular DOS FAT16 partition in C:\LINUX with extra attributes (long file names, unix permissions and so on) stored in a per-directory file called "-LINUX--.---". I used LOADLIN to put the system that was installed on UMSDOS.

You could complete the installation on some other (possibly virtual) machine and then just copy C:\LINUX the same way you transfer any other data to your Pocket 386.

gray386linux used "fixed" kernel 3.7.10 optimized for (only) 80386's (musl + busybox)
https://github.com/marmolak/gray386linux
does it have a package manager? where are packages for it found? <-- no clue

there is also gray486linux for 486's with "current kernel" (I think void and alpine linux also still work on 486dx's)
https://github.com/marmolak/gray486linux

Alpine linux with musl + busybox (or openbox) would be the "lightest" distro that is "current, well documented, popular" for a 486 (does tinycore run on 486's?)
edit: JWM, or other light WM might be runnable, ram/clock speed depending:

Knoppix 7.0.3 was kernel 3.4 (Release 1 july 2012) - I can find no other 3.4 or 3.5/3.6/3.7 kernel based distributions

Kernel 3.8 dropped 80386 support completely (but internet rumor says kernels past 2.2.26, or maybe 2.4.x, were "never tested" on real 80386's and had "errors" preventing them booting)
gray386linux is the only release to ever "fix" the final 80386 compatible kernel to my knowledge

Share the settings you are using in lilo.conf. You need to run it to make sure you don't have your kernel installed at cylinder higher than 1023. One way would be to create a small /boot partition as the first partition that keeps the kernel file within the first 1024 cylinders to prevent an issue. There may be lilo options you can set, or you should be getting a warning.

My notes on booting Slackware 3.9/4.0 say:
"Out of memory with 8mb when running depmod. Need at least 12mb."

Running that with swap is gonna be painful, on a 386SX.

kmeaw wrote on 2024-09-17, 19:20:

I used to have Slackware installed on my 486 on a "UMSDOS" filesystem - it was a supported installation target and I learned about it from some of the bundled instructions. This is a compatibility layer built-in into Linux that stores unix files on a regular DOS FAT16 partition in C:\LINUX with extra attributes (long file names, unix permissions and so on) stored in a per-directory file called "-LINUX--.---". I used LOADLIN to put the system that was installed on UMSDOS.

Yeah, that was nice!

You could complete the installation on some other (possibly virtual) machine and then just copy C:\LINUX the same way you transfer any other data to your Pocket 386.

Even easier: Slackware had what they called "ZipSlack", which was the distribution pre-installed and then put in a .ZIP file which you could just uncompress wherever you wanted. The installation was kept to a size where it would fit on a 100MB Zip disk. I'm pretty sure it was named after the Zip disk and not the .ZIP file 😁

I'm pretty certain that they started releasing ZipSlack before 4.0 because I think I used it with 3.0, and I think Wikipedia said it was released up until around 12.0.

This is it:
http://slackware.cs.utah.edu/pub/slackware/sl … e-4.0/zipslack/

One of the last active/complete slack archives (that I could find)

Another option is to grab images of CDs, e.g.: https://archive.org/details/Slackware_Linux_4 … Creek_June_1999 In that collection it looks like ZipSlack is on CD 1.