[mormonboy]

(If you don't want to read the below paragraph, the I am just wondering which distro you think would be best for an old crappy laptop, but please read below for more info if you have time)

Hi, I have a old laptop that currently has windows 95 on it. I would like to erase the hard drive and put linux on it, but I was wondering wich distro would work best for it. It is old and crappy, it has a 3 gig hard drive, so I don't want a huge distro, but I am not too worried about having a tiny distro, up to a 1 gig or a little higher would be fine. It only has 144 mb of ram, so I want a distro that can run ok on a small amount of memory, but I don't expect excelent performance from it. It does not have a CD drive or USB ports, so that might pose a problem, but it does have a floppy drive and a Ethernet port, so I should be able to a distro installed ok, maybe with a little extra work. Any comments or suggestions would be very welcome, please don't feel afraid to post. I am a little new to the linux world, but hopefully this is not too dumb of a question.

[Self-Defence]

Well I've got an old Toshiba Tecra laptop with 90mHz processor and 32MB ram and 3GB hard drive. It also has no cd drive only a floppy and I found DamnSmallLinux it works like a charm. The only problem is with firefox since it requires quite a lot of resources and causes the laptop to hang.
I installed DamnSmallLinux via another compter. I took out the hard drive plugged it into my desktop (I had to get a laptop/dektop IDE converter) and installed the sistem that way. Then before rebooting I powerd of the desktop and re-plugged the drive back into the laptop and booted it. It recognised all of the hardware and works quite nice. I know it's a bit of a supid way of installing an OS but since it worked....

You clould take a light-weight distro like Slackware or Gentoo and build up the system from scratch. But I can't be much help there since I'm quite new in the world of linux and have never endevored on a task like that. All I know is that it can be done.

Hope it helps..

[bryansmith]

Take a look at the thread in my signature - it will get you started with some great resources. Good luck!