I installed Puppy Linux but it can't activate the ethernet card, the build-in one. Tried all kinds of drivers, to no avail.

I upgraded from 256MB to 1GB of RAM, that made a big difference. It actually works now. It has Windows XP on it now.

It is a 2004 machine.

Downloading Linux Lite.

The lack of wireless is likely not a distro issue. Most device drivers are in the Linux kernel, but some manufacturers' support of Linux is not as--er--enthusiastic as others.

The first step in resolving this is determining what wireless chipset is in that machine. In Linux, the command lspci (list pci devices) issued in a terminal should reveal that information; you may have to issue the command as root.

Having owned several Dells of that vintage, I got a dollar to a doughnut that it's Broadcom wireless. That can be got working, but it usually takes a couple of extra steps to install the correct driver.

The 2400 is a desktop model so it isn't going to have a builtin wireless adapter but frankbell is partially correct that the ethernet adapter is probably a Broadcom i.e. 440x 10/100.

The b44 module might not be included in the version of Puppy you are running. Hopefully Linux lite does and as stated it might take some fiddling to get it working.

For other 32 bit distributions try antiX or Bodhi,

None of the choices offered in the "Puppy Network Wizard" enable the eth0 interface.
The driver is not available in the puppy install.

etcetera,

As michaelk suggests, give antiX a try.

https://antixlinux.com/

It usually copes well with Broadcom.

Slackware has a 32-bit distro as well (the one that doesn't have 'slackware64' in the name), which I've found to work well enough on hardware of that era. Another option would be to grab a cheap PCI NIC and throw it in there - if I remember right the 2400 has 3 PCI slots, and you should be able to find an Intel-based NIC for probably under $10 to your door on ebay.

XP ought to tell us what network card(s) you have.

The published specification says that the chipset is Intel, including integrated 10/100 ethernet support. Have a look at the output of
$ hwinfo --network
and see if it mentions a driver. There's also the command
lshw -C network
but I don't have that, so I can't comment.

It booted off the flash well and recognized everything, NIC and all.

However I ran into issues actually writing it to the hard drive:

when I ran the cli-installer script, I got this. I deleted all the partitions and created a single new one, to no avail. The disk is 40GB. And it started generating errors immediately so I don't think space is the issue.

https://i.imgur.com/SxTZgD5.jpg

https://imgur.com/SxTZgD5

This might help:

https://www.antixforum.com/forums/to...le/#post-44196

Also, it is best to do a dist-upgrade before installing.

I use an old (2005) Dell laptop with Mint 19 32 bit - no problems!

And many years ago I used it with Puppy, again no problems, wired and wifi in both cases

All of my 32 bit Dells (all Optiplex) are running the same distros, in multiboot, as my 64 bit PCs, but with KDE3 or TDE as primary desktop. KDE3 worked fabulously in the era before 64 bit and >2GB RAM were commonplace. It still does, as does its fork, TDE, because they're stable, not disturbed by playtoy developers, and they don't require a whole lot of disk space or RAM. The main distros on mine are openSUSE Tumbleweed, Debian, and Mageia. I tried AntiX, but it hijacks /usr/local/, which here is on its own filesystem that I share among all installed distros, and I heavily depend upon, so it isn't appropriate for my needs. Last Dimension I had was using a generic case, so I junked its motherboard and put in something 64 bit and much newer pulled from a motherboard upgrade elsewhere.

they say it fixed their problem, I will try that.

I installed antix, its nice. The install script is a bit buggy but it finally wrote to the hard drive.

runs nicely no issues. 1gb of RAM, 40GB hdd. 2004 era processor.

Some features may work and others not, if the machine was not originally supported by dell for use with linux.
You should check the dell website.

I had a dell 2-in-1 laptop on which I erased windows to install linux. I found that the touchscreen features worked,
but that the screen closing features did not, so that the machine would not hibernate or shut off the display when the laptop
was closed. I eventually found the cause in the intel hd graphics driver source, but along the way I found on dell website
that my model was not supported for use with linux. The driver problem probably explains why.