No floppy drive, No CD drive, No network card. 486 processor.

[PrincePhoenix]

Hello!
I'm new over here and have never used Linux before.
I have an old laptop, a Gateway 2000 Liberty series, with a 486 processor, 16 MB of RAM and abour 500 MB HDD, given by my uncle about a decade ago. It has a windows 95 installed which seems corrupt. I want to try out linux and put it to some use, maybe as word processor. In the light of a few threads on this forum (can'tpost links yet) and some googling I have decided to install DSL or puppy linux, whichever possible.

Now the floppy drive (it is external) doesn't work (don't know what's wrong even the repairman doesn't have a clue), there is no CD drive, the PCMCIA modem doesn't work, it just says the modem does not respond.
(There is a serial port, a parallel port and a PS/2 port at the back.)

Now I want to know whether it is possible to install DSL,Puppy Linux or any other lightweight distro onto the harddrive of the laptop if I connect it to my PC through a USB-IDE cable.
If there are other possible ways in the given situation, I'll be glad to know.

Thanks in advance.

[twoHats]

Although your plan might work given time and money, unless it is really important to you the cost might be prohibitive.

Everything you work with here will be a problem. When you try to fix the problem, KACHING.

new external drive - KACHING!
new modem - KACHING!

Given all of this, if you still want to try, you may be able to find a serial or parallel
conversion to USB on line somewhere, which would free up your choices for connecting and storage.

Have fun!

[rokytnji]

486 processor, 16 MB of RAM and abour 500 MB HDD

No Modern Linux GUI will load with 16mb of ram. DSL will. But will run slow. Heck. I have a netbook with about the same specs, P66hz,12MB ram, ? Hardrive with Windows 95 and charger, Floppy, and battery still holds a charge also. It still is in pristine condition compared to your description of yours.

Just good for playing floppy games like frogger or dos games or door stop.
I would not ruin it trying to put something like
wiki:install_microcore - Tiny Core Linux Wiki

as it won't meet minimal system requirements. If you want to give puppy linux a go. You are going to have to use a very early older edition of Puppy Linux like version 1.0 or below.

Puppy Linux Discussion Forum :: View topic - Into puppy's past

If me though. I would look for a way to get Windows 95 back on there.
Some folks still sell a set of Windows 95 floppy sets
3 Sets of Floppy Disks Microsoft Window 95, Plus MS DOS | eBay

Other Floppy alternative/Linux you can try
http://sourceforge.net/projects/blueflops/

I know you said

Now the floppy drive (it is external) doesn't work

So for Blue Flops (won't work for Windows 95 I think)

Pull the Hardrive. Install Blueflops via another computer with a working floppy drive and a external ide to usb adapter.

Good Luck.

http://www.arsgeek.com/2006/12/04/in...ur-hard-drive/

Some other stuff back when I toyed with thinking of installing Linux on that old netbook

http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/plan9/index.html

http://www.minix3.org/

[MASONTX]

Considering that Tigerdirect.com has :IBM ThinkCentre 8183-36U Desktop PC - Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz, 512MB DDR, 40GB HDD, CDROM, Windows XP Pro (Off-Lease) $99.99, it would be cheaper to get that than buy parts and try to fix the 486. It would be able to run a much fuller featured linux also at a much faster speed.

[PrincePhoenix]

Thanks to everyone for their thoughts and opinion.