help me
 

hie i am new to linux i have been doing a house clearance and come across an old laptop nothing special but its old running windows 95 i think any way i have used dsl b4 as a bak up incase my pc went dawn haw do i get rid of windows and run dsl on this laptop as it only has a floppy drive and a 2.5 gig hard drive its a relik i know this but instead of throwing it away i thout that putting dsl on it i could make a web browser out of it just for fun is it possable to make a bootable floppy to run the new os on the laptop thanks

Hi,
It will be nice if you will post a bit more information about a hardware of your laptop - did you have only floppy driver? What about PCMCIA, network cards, USB etc.. It is really interesting - many persons are looking for minimal Linux configuration - Linux based system with small requirements and functional. But such 'minimal' configuration
depends on an existing hardware. Greetings.

Depends on how much ram is available. I have a ancient Notebook P66, 12MB of EDO ram, Floppy Only, Windows 95. Makes a good door stop.

If I could bump the ram lets say to 64MB. Tiny Core or Older Puppy, Linux,Debian Net Install, maybe even AntiX CLI base install would be a option using PLOP boot floppy and a PCMCIA USB Card with Pendrive Live Iso. Maybe.

Browsing the web would have to be done using Links2 Browser. Anything else would be too heavy on that weak Netbook. So it gathers dust till it is worth something as a Museum piece.

Blue Flops or Mu may be a option for you also. (check ram specs)

Edit: another option you may try is to pull the hardrive on your notebook. Use a Adapter to hook it up to a computer with a bootable CDROM. Install Linux on Hardrive hooked up to adeapter. Reinstall hardrive back into Notebook. (you better meet the system requirements for any distro you install or it won't boot!)

I found this for you
http://tiny.seul.org/
For me the crucial is the RAM of your notebook. There are 'small' distributions but not necessary in the sense of the 'small' requirements. Some older versions of 'on top' Linux distributions (Debian, Red Hat, Slackware) also may do well for you but there is a contradiction - older versions of the Linux kernel many not have well support for your hardware. But I think still it is worthy to spare a time to build a running Linux system on your Laptop. That's all I can do for you. Greetings.

i will post the specs of the laptop on soon thanks for the tips greetings to u all

Hi,

Welcome to LQ!

With legacy hardware you will need to roll back to a period that should support the hardware. I would use Slackware 8.1 as a starting point on that hardware. Maybe roll back even earlier. Hopefully you will find it will function with some tweaking. Max the RAM if possible. Select XFCE or lighter for a desktop. The HD space for that class would be another limit.

You could use zipSlack to see how things work;
This could be a great learning experience but don't expect to get much out of such old hardware. Don't even try newer kernels on such a old piece of legacy hardware or any newer Gnu/Linux distributions, as drivers would be a big problem. If that baby had Win/95 then I'm sure the battle would not be worth it since you would be battling the processor family limits..