installing red hat with a boot floppy and a speedtouch
 

I want to install linux on my computer. I've already tried knoppix, since people say it's easy. Well, it's indead very easy, but afaik the source isn't installed (I've installed knoppix on my harddrive), so I can't install the nvidia drivers, nor my modem drivers, which sucks.
I've also tried debian, but that crashed in the installation, before I could do anything at all.
Most people say I best start with a mainstream distro like redhat, madrake or suse, but I can't really download a whole cd on my internet computer, because my harddisk is full, so I created a red hat boot floppy, and then I want to install linux via the internet (I used this tutorial: damn why can't I post an url?). The problem is that my modem, an alcatel speedtouch dsl modem, doesn't seem to be on that driver disk.

So how should I do that?

I bought the CD's for both Red Hat 9 and Mandrake 9.1. I've tried many times to get Red Hat to work, but it doesn't come with support for an Alcatel Speedtouch built in. You have to download the drivers, http://www.linux-usb.org/SpeedTouch/index.html compile the modules and possibly even recompile the kernal to get it to use the modules. This is a lot to do if you've only used Windows before. Mandrake 9.1, however, comes with the drivers on the CD (You need all three CD's). After you've installed go to the Mandrake control centre and set up your internet connection. A computer with no internet connection...what's the point of that?

so you say I best use mandrake? I'm not gonna download 3 cd's, so I think I just have to buy the cd's. But which version? I see a lot of versions on their site, and I find some pretty expensive. Is the discovery version good enough? I don't really need zillions of programs. Just if I can boot my computer to kde and surf the web, so I can download all the other things, I'm happy