Chip, I got my hands on a very old laptop as well: a Hitachi E100 with 16 MB RAM and a P1-100 non-MMX. Win-95 1st edition is currently installed on it, and the screen is mostly ok. The problem is that this is a sub-notebook: no cd-rom, which was meant to be an external unit like yours. Since I can't find it, I finally got my hands on a Backpack parallel-port drive. Assuming it will boot off CD, this is a definite possibility. The thing is, I can't remember what year the El-Torito standard came out. Then I came up with option 2, which I've also read about elsewhere: get a 3.5 to 2.5 inch PATA adapter and install the drive as a slave in a desktop computer. You can do anything you want with it now. In addition, I found a good deal on the 100 MB drives used in this thing (4 bucks!) so I got a couple and will just install onto a fresh drive, keeping the original Win-95 drive separate. I haven't done the install yet (one of these days...) but will eventually. The tough part is whether even DSL (Damn Small Linux) can get X and Mozilla working in just 16 megs of ram. If not, oh well. You didn't mention the specs of your machine, but I hope these ideas will help. Mike P.S. For everyone else that helped me before, thanks: I think DRI is working, but my hardware (especially the bus) is just too slow. Still got a good deal I think, though. Now to get Linux on this new laptop of mine (Acer Aspire 5520-5912 from Wal-Mart: Turion X2 1.9 GHz 2 GB ram nforce 610M IGP w/Geforce 7000M integrated and...oh, yeah, vista and the m$ tax...) --- chip33az@netscape.net wrote: > I have a fairly old laptop that uses a special cable for the CD-ROM > (which I can't find). I wanted to put Linux on it and it currently > has > Windows 2000 installed. > > I thought about doing the netinstall from Debian, but wanted to try > something different so I went to > http://lubi.sourceforge.net/unetbootin.html and tried a Fedora 8 > install. > > I ran the Gparted Distro first and that worked well and I was able to > > shrink my Windows partition. > > I then ran the Fedora install. It did take quite a bit of time > (about 1 > 1/2 hours) just to get the OS installed. It was even longer for the > updates (and I thought yum was faster this release). > > I don't know if I would recommend this for an install every time, but > > without a CD/DVD it sure came in handy. > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss > ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss