Wanna do a poor man's slacktop...
 

I have an old (1995) IBM thinkpad 755CSE, I am trying to put linux on it and not doing very well. I have a dual boot win95/ DamnSmallLinux, which I can't get Xvesa to run properly. So, I am wanting to try slackware, and have read in places that slack 7.0 - 8.1 are good choices. I want a light X-server to use a GUI for just playing around, games, maybe a little web browsing. However the only way to access the unit is to remove the hard drive and install it into my home computer, copy files onto it then reinstall the drive into the laptop. From there I know that I need boot/root disks, but how do I access the files to install them? Also what files will I need from the distro? Thanks all.

in my experience with my older laptops, slack 10 worked just as well as the older versions i tried to install.

the one area where i did find that i needed older software was with X. xorg6.7-8 did not have support for the western digital 90c24 graphics chip in my austin486dx4 and i needed to use Xfree86 v3.3 to have drivers (the SVGA driver to be exact)

as to the files you will need, do a default install of the A and N packages. That makes it easy, even though the N packages contains much more than necessary for simple networking. I installed xfree86 v3.3 from the xfree86 website, as a binary installation, although i can not recall if i needed anything from the D (development) slackware package in order to make the install.

I agree. I use Slackware 10.0 on my old IBM Thinkpad 770X (1998) and everything works 100%. It's certainly worth a shot!