I have an old Latitude XPi laptop, P75, 24mb ram, 1.3gb HD, no Cd-Rom, and currently no network card. After giving up trying to get Slackware working, I'm searching for a different distro to use with that thing. DSL looks like the perfect candidate except I'm not sure how I'd go about getting it installed to the HDD in my case.

So can it be done? I have a parallel-port Zip drive, a floppy drive, and a primary laptop running Windows XP which I can use for transferring files to disks. Research tells me that once DSL is running, I can modprobe ppa and it should recognize the Zip drive then... but I need the Zip drive working in order to run DSL. Seems like a bit of a catch-22 to me.

One possibility, if it might help, is that I have a Slackware 7.1 boot floppy that includes the ppa driver... is there maybe a way to boot from that and then load the DSL image to continue with the install?

Take out the hard disk and put it in another laptop that does have the necessary drives then swap. Duh!

I did not react pleasantly upon reading this. Maybe it was well intentioned, maybe it wasn't. I can't tell the difference in a text-based post. Sorry if I'm taking it wrong, but I've come to expect an elitist attitude from Linux users, and that comment sounded pretty elitist to me.

Anyway, that idea won't work. The hard drive physically won't fit in a newer laptop. Zip disks and floppies are pretty much all that will work without a great deal of trouble. Trust me, I've considered all my options.

I've been thinking, though, maybe I'll boot to a Slackware floppy, format the HD, and copy the image off a Zip disk onto the HD. Then I should [theoretically] be able to just install from the HD itself, without needing Zip support during DSL install.

Murphy will prolly make sure that doesn't actually work in practice, but I'ma try it anyway.