I am looking for a distro for my dell latitude lm p166 with 40Mb of ram and a 2Gig HD. I am a total newbie but use SuSE 9.2 on my other PC. Are KDE and/or Gnome out? Right now the laptop does not have a cd-rom only a floppy. Any full floppy installs? If not i'm bidding on a cd-rom for it on ebay right now. I guess I just need some direction toward a distro that will work on this machine (floppy or cd install) with a user friendly GUI.
Thanks.

++UPDATE++
I know have the cd-rom and it works accept the bios will not give me an option to boot from cd. I also have 72mb of RAM now and a cable so that I can connect the floppy as well as the CD-Rom. Does the DSL download come with the ability to make boot floppy/floppies to get the install started?
Thanks Again.

Maybe DamnSmallLinux.

If you have a network connection in your laptop (modem, isdn, ethernet) there would be the possibility to install zipslack (a UMSDOS-based Slackware on a FAT-partition) - available in 30 floppys (www.slackware.com and other mirrors under zipslack/split). You can boot zipslack out of DOS and when it starts up you can install a real linux (Slackware). Additional software (X, fluxbox, a fast browser) you can install via internet-connection.

I use Slackware with a 2.4.31 kernel and X, fluxbox and firefox on a Toshiba Libretto, 166 MHz P MMX, 32 MB RAM. With fluxbox it is no problem to run a gui. Even fast and lightweight texteditors are available.

Fluxx.

You can run most any recent version of any distro on that laptop. The only caution would be to stick with a slightly older version. I had an IBM TP365XD that's about the same specs as your Dell. It worked fine on Mandrake/Mandriva from about version 8.0 up through 9.2. I could never get 10.0 to install, and didn't really want to investigate much further since 9.2 ran quite well.

With 40MB, you would right on th edge of being able to use even a lightweight GUI such a XFCE, but you may be O.K. with something like IceWM. If you can upgrade from 40MB to 64MB, or more, you could be quite stable, unless you have a lot of of large apps open at the same time. My old IBM was upgradeable after burning in a BIOS update, but even so I was only able to top out at 72MB (8MB on the motherboard plus a 64MB SODIMM).