Can I wipe my HD clean of Windows 95 and put Linux on it?

[kazoo]

Can I wipe my HD clean of Windows 95 and put Linux on it?

My background:

I discovered the world of open source about a year ago and have been fascinated with it ever since. And then I discovered that you could actually RUN a computer with it. (Yes, I'm very, very green.)

So for the last couple of weeks, my off-hours project has been to get my old IMB Thinkpad 701CS (a 486 with 700 or so MB of disk space and 8 MB RAM) running again, with Linux, so I can learn more. This laptop runs Windows 95b. It has a functional 3.5" floppy drive and a 4x CD drive. I have a Netgear network card for it but the computer isn't recognizing it right now, and I have no browser, apparently.

I've been through the newbie links on this forum and have done lots of Googling, but I warrant that I may somehow still be missing the solution to my problem, which is this:

Using another computer, I made a CD of Damn Small Linux -- filename dsl-3.3-embedded.zip, which i got from this webpage, ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distribu...small/current/, because it said you could run it from within Windows. I started it up and then it started asking for this and that missing Windows driver. When I gave up on the process, my research was showing that I need WS2_32.dll, which I can only get with some sort of "winsock" update, which I can only install if I have my Windows 95 installation disk, which I don't have any more.

I was thinking I could get the Win95 disk off ebay, but the thing is, I don't care about Windows 95, so I'm not sure I want to go through that trouble. I feel like I'm going in circles and would very much appreciate any direction someone might provide.

[flipjargendy]

You can easily do this. It's easier then installing a dual boot system (Windows & Linux on different partitions or hard drives) because you don't have to mess around with any partitioning or GRUB.

It sounds like you're on the right track by downloading Damn Small Linux. When you install Linux on the hard drive all you have to do is make a partition for swap space (i usually make the swap space the same size as my 1.5 times larger then my RAM) and a partition for Linux. The Linux partition should be an Ext2 or Ext3 Journaling system. There is almost always a partitioner built into the Linux Installer so you don't have to worry about partitioning before the install. Although i'm not very familiar with Damn Small Linux... maybe it doesn't have one built in.

You can easily find guides to installing each distro if you need it.

[kazoo]

flipjargendy, thanks for responding!

New question: if I format my hard drive, will my computer recognize my CD-Rom drive, which attaches to the computer via PCMCIA card? Or is that a question for another forum?