It is shown that for any positive epsilon the strip-packing problem, i.e. the problem of packing a given list of rectangles into a strip of width 1 and minimum height, can be solved within 1 + epsilon times the optimal height, in linear time, if the heights and widths of these rectangles are all bounded below by an absolute constant delta > 0. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.