Following the install instructions at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...?part=1&chap=5 using the minimal CD (not enough ram for universal), my Linux partition runs out of space half-way through extracting portage. According to http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...?part=1&chap=2 all I need is 1.5 GB to install Gentoo, but this seems to be false.

I'd love to get rid of Windows 98 as not only is it slow and old, it cannot use anything plugged into the usb port of my Thinkpad 600 (internet, flash-drive etc). I only still have it so I can play Total Annihilation where-ever there is a powerpoint.

I hoped moving both tarballs to the windows partition (hda1) and extracting them from there would work, but hda4 still filled to the brim while applying solvent (!) to the portage tarball.

How do I install gentoo on this laptop?

Have a look at what 'df' tells you.
I assume 'df -h' will show you some free space available while 'df -i' will show that there are no more free inodes available.

The portage tree consists of a lot of small files, means it doesn't consume much space but a lot of inodes.
In addition mkfs.ext2/3 by default does not reserve enough free inodes on such a small filesystem for so many files.

You have to tell mkfs.ext2/3 to prepare the filesystem for lots of inodes proportional to the filesystems size.

mkfs.ext2/3 -T small /dev/hda4
should do the trick. You could also use the '-i' option if you want to calculate/specify your desired bytes/inode ratio.

Thanks, that would probably be my problem, as df tells me me drive is about half-full while df -i tells me I've used 100% of my indodes. Darn MFTs!
Would reiserFS work better on such a small HD or would it require substantially more CPU cycles to use? Else I'll just re-format my filesystem as ext3 with more inodes.

Tried reiser - ran out of RAM while extracting When I mounted my swap (swapon) and extracted, tar spat out the same old error message about Cannot open: No space left on device even though it's only 23% full.
I'll have to format it as ext3 with more inodes.

I created the filesystem using mkfs.ext2 -T small /dev/hda4, but as usual, but now I get the error message at 24% space usage and 6% inode use.
What's going on?

EDIT: I'm an idiot - I was extracting it to /usr, rather than usr (I was in /mnt/gentoo)