Dell Inspiron 3000: Good distro Suggestions?

[ghuang]

I've tried so many distros (Mandrake, Fedora, SLAX, Cool, Damn Small, Gentoo, even the Knoppix live CD would not mount it's own CD), to install on this old system. 128 MB RAM, 4 GB HD w/ Win98. None of them, save SuSE, installed without hitch. Even when SuSE installed it was able to detect, but not activate, the PCMCIA network card or the Crystal sound system. Then it also was so slow to run that I canned it. I could not figure out the next step to get the network card working. I am brand new to Linux and would love to get this old laptop a new linux life.

What am I doing wrong? Where should I look for a tutorial?

Thanks for your help!

Glenn

[redhatgeek]

http://www.ps.uci.edu/~tomba/inspiron/#summary

[genesus]

I have an old Dell with similar specs, a latitude with a p2 333, 128mb, 6 gig,
\
fc2 runs pretty good with a large /swap, though the internet connection is slow, Vectorlinux runs really well, you should give it a try, though for some reason I had to dl it 3 or 4 times to get an uncorrupted iso, but once its up and running its pretty fast, older versions of slackware might work as well,

the only problem I've found is that the touchpad doesn't work on install, had to fool around with it for awhile...

good luck