I am mixed up because there is so many distros but I need specific things.

I have an old machine that I don't want or need X on. Its a Laser Pal 386SX. I have a 3.5 floppy disk and a 5 1/4 floppy disk drive in it. So I want a floppy distro that installs on the hard drive not just a bootable floppy that I can go in and install it over the DOS. I also need support for 5 1/4 floppies. I either need nano/pico built in or I can try somehow to get it on it since a small Linux distro probally isn't going to have gcc. I will use vi/vim if worst comes to worst. Also I have no network card in it so if it doesn't support eth0 then its still good.

You might want to take a look at slack81.zip I use it on an old laptop and it works great. Don't know about 5.25 support though.

Last I checked, Linux is just as happy with my 5.25 as my 3.5
Zipslack is a good choice of a command line install, and it installs to a FAT partition.
ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackwar...k/split/README