I'm currently attempting to put Linux on my laptop, but I can't seem to find a distro with the right installation method for me.

You see, this laptop is rather old. It's a 486 with 12mb of ram. This in itself is not a problem, I've done installs on worse. The killer here is that it has no CD drive, just a floppy drive and 200mb hdd.

Because of this, I need a distro that can be set up with the smallest amount of floppies possible, preferably a distro that I can boot a netinstaller from 1-3 floppies with. I have a pcmcia ethernet card which I know is supported under linux, because I had managed to get some liveboot 2 floppy distro running on it for awhile (but I can't recall the name of the distro) and I could browse the web with lynx.

Before everyone suggests Debian, I'll just say that Debian is not an option. For some reason or another, the laptop just tells me 'Boot Failed' whenever I try to boot from one of their floppies. I know it isn't a problem with the disk, because I've tried it on several different occasions with different (good) floppies and several (good) downloads of the images.

So I'm stuck. Anyone have a solution?

Thanks.

You should be able to do a decent netinstall with slackware, though it has been YEARS since I have done so.

http://delilinux.berlios.de/

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too bad debian net floppy installer doesn't works for you..
debian:~# cat boot.img > /dev/fd0
http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/rawwrite.htm

beli would probably be your best bet..

you realy can't do too much with that old machine..