Disk installation
 

i have a OLD laptop no CD rom.. 12mb of ram and 320mb harddrive.. does any one know of a small GOOD distro.. i can put on my laptop.. for Wordprocessing and Experimentwork (still learnin linux)

Since you won't be able to really fit a full distro install obviously, on your system, the best idea would be to install what are called Mini-Distros. You'll find plenty out there if you do a search. There are also distros that are so small they are meant to be portable on floppies. Peanut Linux is good I hear for a small distro, it's 99Megs. That's probably what you'll need to look for though. They are all accessable though for download.

Sounds like you want Debian - my favourite distro.

You can install it from all sorts of media including floppy disk and network, and a minimal install is about 30MB. Once you have that you can add just the things that you want to get a useable system.