News installation of Linux

[accon]

I'm looking to install Linux on an old laptop which has Windows 95 installed. I'm looking to so this the cheapest wasy possible and was looking for some advice.

Thanks

 

[venkman]

Does the laptop have a functional cd drive and floppy? I have an old pentium 90 laptop with a floppy drive and a pcmcia ethernet card but no cd drive. I installed redhat 6.2 on it. To do this I downloaded the iso images to my normal pc (a p3-1GHz), made a bootable floppy disk, and then installed redhat 6.2 over the network using my LAN and the images on my other pc. Maybe this is the type of thing you are looking for? You could install debian, I believe they support old, slower computers, but I had trouble getting that to work the first time I tried it. If you have a cd drive and access to a burner, you could burn the images and run the install from the cd. I have to warn you, I'm not sure how old your laptop is, but redhat 6.2 ran very slowly on mine... but then again I think win95 ran pretty slow also.

-Venkman

 

[pavNell]

It's been my experience with old PC's that more memory makes a big performance difference with Linux. Also, if you install without any GUI's (KDE and gnome), you'll be surprised just how fast Linux can run on old stuff.

HTH
Matt