how to start ?
 

I recieved an older comp ( P3 running windows 95 ) and want to put Linux only on it. I have cd's with linux but the comp won't boot from cd, bios doesn't support that. How or where do I start?
Thanks

What exactly are you interested in doing with your box? Are you trying to make it a lightweight desktop, a webserver, an ftp server, etc?

The first thing I would do is scour the web and see if you can find a bios update that will allow booting from CD.

Otherwise, you can try using a distribution that still can boot from floppy like slackware or Debian Sarge. However, these are generally regarded as two of the more difficult distros to learn.

Oh, you could also try following this on how to boot an installer disk from the hard drive.

There is a way to boot a floppy that will turn over the boot process to the cdrom. You need to have a Windows machine running in order to do this. You can download the sbootmgr.dsk disk image from a Slackware mirror site to your Windows system. Then use the rawrite.exe tool on your Windows system to copy this image to a floppy disk.

I don't know if this floppy image will boot or if you need a Slackware boot disk. If you need a Slackware boot disk you do the same thing with the boot disk image. You would want to use the old_cd.i boot disk image. You would do the same thing. Download the old_cd.i image to a Windows machine. Then use the rawrite.exe utility to write this image to floppy.

More information can be found on these two pages.
http://slackware.com/install/bootdisk.php
http://slackware.com/install/rootdisk.php

The Slackware mirror sites have all got the same directory structure. I will show you where the files are in this structure. You can use a different mirror if you want.

The rawrite.exe utility is found at
http://lmlinux.com/distros/slackware...ent/bootdisks/

The sbootmgr.dsk file is found at
http://lmlinux.com/distros/slackware...ent/rootdisks/

The old_cd.i file is found at
http://lmlinux.com/distros/slackware...ent/bootdisks/

Hopefully when you boot these images from your floppy disk then you will be able to tell the software to boot from the cdrom.

Thanks to stress_junkie and pljvaldez for your responses. They give me a bit of direction to start with. I will try your suggestions and see if I can get this old box to run linux. Thanks again guys.

If you CAN get your PC to boot from CD then Zenwalk would be my 1st choice, but failing that why don't you try out Puppy Linux? (http://www.puppylinux.org) It is a bit different from a 'normal' linux distro but it is a lot of fun. Plus you can boot it from a floppy disk using 'Wakepup'. See below:

http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=3875