[Techtalk] Installing Linux on an older laptop

[Tabatha Persad]

Hi all,

I'm in a bit of a pickle.  I have this old Dell Latitude XPi machine,
it's wimpy.  It has an SMC9000 nic in the docking station, 24mb ram, and
just about a gig of hard drive space.

I used to have Windows 98 installed on the machine, then explorer.exe
died, and I was never able to recover the system so I wiped it.

Unfortunately, all I had around at the time was DOS 5 and Windows 3.1,
so I tried those, and then tried some solutions to get the thing
networking, but to no avail.

Does anybody have experience installing Linux from a floppy onto a
machine that has no CD drive?  If I can just get my network to see the
machine, I can copy installation files to the HD and do the install that
way, but I'm a fair bit rusty, and I don't think my machine will handle
something like Mandrake or RedHat (although I don't know for sure).

I've usually done installs from CD, not from a network (I tried once a
couple years back with no success), so I'm feeling a little lost.  If I
didn't provide enough details, please ask!

Can someone point me in the right direction or explain how I might get a
Linux installation accomplished with what I have to work with?  I'm not
fussy on distro - whatever will work on the machine I'll be happy to
use!

Thanks much for any advice!

-- 
Tabatha Persad
Web: www.merlinmonroe.com
Linux Documentation Project Review Coordinator (http://www.tldp.org)
Gnu Writing Movement Contributor (http://gwm.gnu.org)
Linux Counter Area Manager US:wa (http://counter.li.org)



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