I've got a new pc. It's a small, low powered industrial unit and I want to set it up running linux. Not sure exactly what flavour, I want to play a few flash videos and want something easy to use.

The PC has usb but there doesn't seem to be an option to boot from that. I've bodged in and old floppy but I don't want to leave that connected ultimately. It has a laptop HDD, network connection but no cd rom. I can transfer stuff onto the HDD by putting it in my usb caddy and sticking it in my desktop PC.

What is the easiest way to get a decent linux OS up and running? All the tutorials seem to want me to make a boot cd or assume it already has windows on it and neither of these are possible.

I've done a quick search without success but I'm happy to be pointed at faqs and other threads

Hmmm, here a few suggestions of mine:

If you have a connection to high speed internet, you could download a boot floppy for a specific distro and download packages through ftp. then once the distro is installed you won't need the floppy drive anymore.

Arch linux provides this technique for installing it's distro, but it not might be the best to start off with, especially if your still new to linux.

I know that Debian also offers the floppy-ftp technique, and it's a bit easier than arch to install. They also have a lot of documentation. Although general debian software is quite old, they don't always keep their stable relase up-to-date with the latest packages available.

I don't know if Ubuntu offers the choice, it's a distro based on Debian so it might.

Otherwise if you don't have high speed internet, you can find an iso somewhere, copy it onto your hdd using your usb caddy, load a floppy and make beleive that the iso is an actual CD drive. Gentoo has a section on alternate install methods, and they have quite a lot of different installation varieties, maybe they have one that uses this technique.

Well, those are a few of my suggestions. Maybe someone around has better ideas.

I've set my laptop up with knoppix and tried to network boot from that without any luck. It just seems to skip past the network boot bit as if nothing is happening. Is what I'm trying to do quite hard? I was hoping to just copy something onto the hdd and boot directly from that