i have an old Packard Bell with a 1.2gb HDD, Pentium 150mhz, 16mb RAM, and an AMIBIOS bios chip...

the problem:

i can not boot from CD... the cdrom is only usable after windows 95 starts... i have no USB capabilities, and no network card... i can see the cdrom driers loading as windows loads, but that dopesnt help me since the bios has no ability to boot to cd... just to floppy, hard drive, and network.

so, anyone know any easy fixes? i need either a bios flash that allows me to boot to the cdrom (if possible... the drivers loading when windows does tells me it may not be), or i need a floppy that is designed to boot a cdrom... or a windows 95 utility that can set the pc to boot from cdrom on restart (dunno if there is one).... i want linux on this thing... but i need to be able to install it first


no, im not a linux n00b... im just experimenting with really old hardware for a change and need help with it... its basically gonna become a script/programming practice machine as well as a test bed for different distros...

i can not boot from CD...
... you mean, no option in bios to boot from CD.

You can boot from a floppy image that contains the CDROM drivers, then transfers to the process to the install CD. IIRC: the Ubuntu install disk has such a floppy image using SBM (Smart Boot Manager).

Another approach is to install a floppy-based distro, and use that to net-install a fuller distro of your choosing.