best course of option for dualboot on laptop?

[hobblinharry]

I have a very old Fujitsu Lifebook laptop with Windows 98 on it and want to set up dualboot with Linux, preferably Fedora distro.

What is the best way to go about doing this, and also since its a pretty old laptop is there perhaps a better distro I should be going with?

[L4Linux]

Welcome to the forum hobblinharry.
Post your laptop specifications to give you suggestions about a distro that runs well on your laptop.
2 popular light distros are Vector Linux and Puppy Linux. If even Vector Standard Edition feels slow or does not boot, try Vector Light.

How you do dual booting depends on how much free space you have, so tell as your hdd size as well.

[hobblinharry]

It is 5GB hard drive, 100MB ram, is running Windows ME (upgraded from 9, and it looks like someone half attempted to install Windows XP on it because I have a dualboot option between those two OSes, but the XP wont load.

2.5GB is used up by Windows ME

I should also mention that this laptop uses a USB Wireless internet receiver,

the SMCWUSB-G version 6.3.4.16

[hobblinharry]

I went ahead and tried out PuppyLinux since it had a liveboot and I got to say everything works just fine on this crummy old laptop.

I'm wondering though, any other suggestions for a distro? I havent tried VectorLinux yet but I set up a liveboot for it as well.

[L4Linux]

You can search in Distrowatch for Distros for Old Computers.

It is very good to hear that Puppy worked out of the box for you!
The wireless worked too?

You can leave Windows if you need a legacy application not available in Linux and WINE can't run it. Since the hdd is very limited, I suggest having 3 partitions:
1)The Windows partition, left intact.
2)384MB swap partition
3)The rest as ext3 partition for the / partition.

If you want to remove Windows completely, just delete that partition and make a big partition for Puppy. A good practice is making a separate partition for /home (that's were your documents,movies and music are stored. It is the equivalent of Documents and Settings / My Documents), but your hdd is very limited and I don't have a suggestion on how to divide space between / and /home, so maybe it would be better not to make one...

If you ever install Linux on a bigger hdd, make a separate /home, it will save you from much work and issues when you upgrade you distro.

[hobblinharry]

Yeah the USB wireless adapter worked out of the box too. After seeing that Puppy was running fine I went ahead and wiped Windows which freed up nearly 3 of the 5 gig hard drive, so I might go ahead and take up the suggestion of a separate partition for media files.

Also thanks for the link for distros on old computers.