Knoppix on Dell Latitude

I have an old Dell Latitude 133XPi laptop. It has an internal floppy and hard drive. The CD reader is external and hooks up thru a PCMCIA port. The laptop is not able to boot from CD so I can't run Knoppix Live CD. I tried using Smart Boot on a floppy, but it doesn't recognize the CD reader (it apparently doesn't recognize devices on the the PCMCIA ports).
I'm totally new to Linux so and wondering if there is a reasonable fix for my laptop. I'd like to run Linux on the laptop as it's gathering dust otherwise.