installing on a HDD on laptop without a boot cd drive?

[sapper]

Can anyone give me any pointers as to how I may be able to install knoppix on an old P120 Compaq with 48mb ram and a partitioned 2.1 HDD. It does have a Floppy drive and I do have an external CD drive running throught he parrallel port. there is no USB but do have a PC card slot. I do have access to other PC's and have the capability of networking if necessary.

At present I'm running Windows 98 Lite (without IE browser) and use the second partition for storing files etc. I just thought that running knoppix or another Linux distro would be a better idea and would inject some life into an old laptop. Failing that it's for the scrap heap and a new one for xmas.

Apologies but I have posted this on the Laptop forum as well - not sure where it belongs.

[mzilikazi]

Well several problems here. The biggest is that Knoppix simply will not fit on a 2G partition. You'll have to use a smaller distro. Alot of people seem to like Damn Smal Linux. Never tried it myself. Also you certainly will not want to run KDE on that old box. Fluxbox would be perfect. You could boot the compressed KNOPPIX file from hdd but I do not know if DSL can do this or not. Or perhaps you can use a netboot with a live Linux disc runing on another box on your LAN.

Personally I would just use the Debian installer and build Debian with floppies. It's not that hard.