I'd like to install v12 on a Dell Optiplex sx260. It has a floppy dive, network card, USB ports and a blank HDD it can boot from floppy, hdd, network or CD(internal one I assume). I have a EPAT parallel port CD drive that I can connect to it. Apart from that I have an elderly W98 computer with a CD burner.

What would be the best way with this set up of installing V12. I'm completely new to Linux though not to programming, I'm happy to work at this, I just don't know what to try next.

I had a go at installing V11 - this is what happened
I couldn't find any v12 floppy images so decided to go with V11 to start with in the hope of upgrading once I'd got it up and running...
I've managed to boot the Dell using floppies (pportide.i, install.1, install.2) which are kernel 2.4.33.3 and it can see the CD ROM. I've managed to get some way through the installation process. - partitioned, added the swap partition and formated the other partion as ext2. It can find the CD drive, and offers me set A (though there are others on the CD) when I agree it repeatedly asks me to insert a CD.
So I'm stuck. (Oh and from time to time during the installation it takes around 20 mins to inform me that there is no partition on /dev/pda which is making for very slow progress in experimenting with anything.

The dell has no internal CD drive, correct?
Your best bet may be to install over the network.
If your win box has a USB connector you could download the installation iso and *copy* it to the USB stick and then plug that into the dell after booting with the (v11) floppies and proceed with the installation after manually mounting the iso image.
None of the boot floppies are going to support the parport CD drive, but you could also boot with the floppies and manually load the needed kernel module so that the installer can access the drive. You'd need to download the kernel-modules package separately, unpack it and copy the module to another floppy.

Thank you for the suggestions.
My win box doesn't really talk to its USB ports very well - just one of the reasons for wanting to leave W98 behind...
I accidentally started two threads on this topic and with some suggestions from the other one I have just managed to use the parallel port CD drive to get a basic v11 system up and running :-)
Am going to learn more about Linux using that before I attempt to move to v12.
Liz