I am looking to install some flavour of Linux on an old Dell Latitude CPi laptop (PII, 350MHz, 128MB of RAM, 6GB hard drive). It has a floppy drive and a USB port, but no CD, network access or existing OS. Even after flashing the BIOS, it does not have the option of booting from the USB port, so I am stuck with booting from floppy.
I am looking for a fairly basic distro as all I want to use it for is text editing, so my questions are:
1) Are there any small distros that offer a basic GUI and come exclusively on floppies? I installed Windows 3.11 (!) as an experiment and that uses 9 discs (3 to install MS-DOS first, then 6 for 3.11 itself) but it predates USBs so I'd have to be saving to floppy (which I'd do as a last resort, but I'd rather use USB). A Linux distro that uses a similar number of floppies and gives me a GUI and USB support would be great!
2) Are there any that I can whack on a USB stick and use a boot floppy with? I've booted up with 'BG Rescue' which sees the USB stick in fdisk, but I don't know how to use it to boot from the USB. Most of the distros I've come across assume the USB is bootable, but I can't seem to find any that use a bootdisk to access USB (there's plenty out there on booting from CD using one). Alternatively, I could copy the files or an ISO across to a partition on the hard drive, but then again I don't know how to get the bootdisk to access them/it.
3) Are there any distros which are non-hardware-specific, i.e. that I could install to a desktop PC (with CD-ROM), take an image of the harddrive and copy over?
All help gratefully received, spare me from the horrors of 3.11 and MS Write!
Jason

As far as I am aware, there are no "real" distributions that install only from floppies anymore. It would require thousands of floppy disks to install a modern Linux distro.

However, some distributions still employ boot floppies which contain the installer and expect you to provide a source of packages. In this case, you could use an attached USB storage device to hold the actual packages (or disc image) and just boot the installer with the floppies.

You might also want to broaden your horizons a bit and consider BSD. The OpenBSD installer can be started with just a single floppy; or at least, it did the last time I used it.

The easiest method is to remove the hard drive and put it in a different laptop. Do the install there; I've used this method to install Debian on an old laptop.

If you have access to another machine, I'd suggest downloading one of the USB-distros (check distrowatch to find one). Then you can create a boot floppy that will point to the kernel on the USB drive. A number of the USB distros have an option to then install them to the local hard disk. Do that.

I've not done this, so I don't have any more specific distro names or even a link to a how-to.

Alternatively, you could get your hands on a USB external CD-ROM drive and use the boot floppy to launch the installer from CD.

Isaac's suggestion is also ok, but be warned that it could lead to hardware driver issues.

Drivers shouldn't be much of a problem as it is going to install a generic kernel in any event. The only problem you might run into would be the XOrg configuration, but that can easily be fixed by running the automatic configuration again

Check http://goodbye-microsoft.com/more.html. Not sure if the installer runs in Win 3.11 as well. Check also the links on the page and the Wiki articles.

Doesn't that laptop have PCMCIA slots? I remember those were usually on laptops before USB ports. Can't you find a PCMCIA network adapter? That would make your life much easier.

jlinkels

Thanks to everyone for their replies, I'll certainly bear all the solutions in mind.
I did some further research and came across this idea, which looked promising. I tried it with a number of distros other than Fedora (which I think judging by previous experience on other machines would probably run like a dog on this one) - Xubuntu, PC Linux Mini Me, Vector, Mandriva. All booted the install ISOs but the installs failed for various reasons (one went into a kernel panic, one got stuck probing SCSI devices for about 10 minutes - I can't remember which was which as it was 3am by this point!).
I've now dug out an old copy of Windows ME (yeah, I know) and got it on there by copying the installation files from the USB to the hard drive (using BG Rescue), booting with a Windows rescue disk and running setup, so when I get a bit more time I'll get hold of a PCMCIA card and experiment with a network install. Unfortunately my other laptop has a SATA drive, so I can't use that.
Thanks again,
Jason

Since you don't have an appropriate laptop (one with an IDE hard drive), the easiest option is to buy a 2.5"->3.5" IDE adapter and do the install on a desktop computer. I've done this with Debian.

A PCMCIA card with PXE boot floppy would be the best solution if you can get it to work, though, because you'll likely want an ethernet connection at some point in any case.