I have a very old notebook:

Siemens Nixdorf Scenic mobile 500

Pentium 100
16 Mbyte RAM
1 Mbyte Video RAM
810 Mbyte HD
Parellel CDROM

I want install linux on it...
Please help me to chose the distro.
I think to install a distro with X, like:
-Damn small linux (fluxbox)
-Luit linux (xfce)

Do you have suggestions?

Now I have Slackware without X, but the disk is FULL.
I boot Slack-CD by floppy, using that for external cdrom.
How can I boot from cd other distros?

Thanks

Sorry for my english ;-)

The basic rule here is. Pick a distro as old as the laptop itself is.

The previous reply is directly on-target,
but let me add an additional 2 cents

My experience is that it takes *at least* 80MB of
RAM to run a gui. So you will be limited to a
command-line os.

You do have a CDROM drive hanging off the parallel
port, but this limits you very much. You can't boot from
it -- and I have never experienced a linux machine with
the proper drivers for a parallel-port CD. Anybody care
to chip in on this point?

You did not list a Network card for the machine. So,
The only way to install an OS is by using the floppy drive.
Or, by using a boot floppy that has parallel-port cd drivers.
This might be your biggest challenge.

So, assuming you can boot a floppy that will allow access to a cd,
then here is my suggestion.

Download and burn to cd a so-called "live distro". These are complete
Linux distributions that run from cd. Many of them give you the choice
of cui/gui at boot time.

Check out DistroWatch: http://distrowatch.com/

I run Suse/Novell for my main system, but my favorite
livecd is SLAX. You can find SLAX at DistroWatch. It is very
small, uses few resources, and boots to a command-line interface.
(but a KDE is only a command away)

DSL will run on that

Yes, it doesn't have a network card.
I think to use a boot floppy (SMB) to start the parallel port cd.

I want use a small live distro and then I install it on hd.
I'm looking for the most complete and smallest distro.

thanks