I have an old computer, it's a celeron. It was used as a point of sale pc. It has Networks cards, however no CD Rom and the Bios is old so I cannot boot to USB, I don't think i can boot to the Nic card either.

it currently has windows xp on it. I can get on the internet and download a linux ISO. I was wondering how I could possibly download the ISO somehow extract it then boot to the install for the distro??

For the record I don't want a virtual machine, I want to totally install over the windows OS.


Thanks

[not ideal]i think ubuntu has a thing where it installs an image file to c:\ then uses that to boot up with...

you can also take the harddrive out, plug it into another machine, install linux then put it back.

I take it you can plug in a usb stick
and if it's an old pc you must have a floppy drive
If that's the case, even if your BIOS cannot boot on USB
you can do so by using plop

1. download plop boot manager
2. after you unpacked the zip archive, there should be a floppy image
that you can use to make a bootable floppy with plop on it
3. insert a bootable usb stick that allows you to launch the setup program
in the iso
(with slackware for instance it's possible to do so)
4. insert your plop floppy
5. reboot

you should get a menu that let you select the media you want to
boot from and there should be an entry for usb

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html

No floppy either I may be able to figure out something. This is not a typical pc it was used as a Point Of Sale pc in the store.

thought about that too, but this uses an old laptop small ide hard drive.

Will the ubuntu thing work with any distro??

There are regular ide to notebook ide adapters. Here is one I found:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812116211

And a cheaper one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812203012

cool lazlow I figured there may be something out there like that. I guess if there is no other way then I may go with that. Not sure, The pc is probably worth less than $30

Apparently the PLOP bootmanager can be started using the Windows XP bootloader, see: http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html#runwin

sweet i will give that a try thanks guys!!!