DOWNLOADING AND INSTALLING SLS With the exception of the a1 disk, all of the SLS diskettes can be made by writing the contents of their respective directories to a MS-DOS diskette, using standard MS-DOS tools. For this reason, all of the files in the SLS directories obey the 8.3 filename length restrictions imposed by MS-DOS. Thus, all of the files in the a2 directory should be copied to a single floppy disk labeled a2; all of the files in the a4 directory should be copied to a single floppy disk labeled a4; and so on. It doesn't matter whether the floppies are 3 or 5 inch floppies; however, they do need to be the high density 1.2 meg or 1.44 meg size. [For advanced users only: Note that it is also possible to write the SLS diskettes using one of the native Linux filesystems; either the minix or ext filesystems. The advantage of doing this is that it will be slightly faster to read them. The disadvantage is that MS-DOS will not be able to manipulate those floppies; indeed, you will not be able to create them unless you already have Linux up and running on your system. If you only have MS-DOS available to you, just ignore this paragraph.] The SLS a1 disk can not be a MS-DOS filesystem disks. Thus, it is distributed as an image file --- if you are copying the image to a 3 inch diskette, use the file a1.3; if you are copying the image to a 5 inch diskette, use the file a1.5. If you are accessing this distribution from a Unix or Linux system, use the dd command to copy the image file to the floppy: dd if=a1.3 of=/dev/floppy bs=16k If you are accessing this distribution from a MS-DOS system, use the RAWRITE program found in the dos_utils directory. After you have created all of the SLS flopies you need, follow the directions in the README file to actually install Linux on your hard disk. Good luck!