I am trying to update an aging Toshiba (Portege 7020CT)laptop by installing a 40Gb hard drive and increasing the RAM to 196 Mb(max allowable)with the idea that this would be a dual boot box. The machine is partitioned as:

/dev/hda1 VFAT 24Gb
/dev/hda5 / 12Gb
/dev/hda6 swap 1Gb

XP Pro is installed in the VFAT partition and functions perfectly.

There is an external CDROM which does not permit booting but otherwise is recognized by XP and works fine.

There is also an external floppy drive which works fine.

The problem I am having has to do with installing Linux. I would prefer to put on RH 7.2/7.3/9 or one of the Fedora issues. I lean towards the earlier RH distros to keep the taxing of the CPU to a minimum. Any Linux item would probably suffice, with or without Xwindow, but I do need a full set of shell commands and functions.

Due to the limitations of the CD I need to do a FTP, HTTP or NFS install but can't do it so far because of the lack of a suitable driver for the nic (NetGear FA411)card. There lies the rub. I can boot from a floppy into single mode but have no resources to deal with installing/compiling a nic driver. If I could get the driver into an .img mode I might be okay but have no means or tools to do more.

Any and all suggestions will be welcome