Quote Originally Posted by acowboydave
... The cds I am trying to install came from a linux on line store. 3.7 is the only cd the computer reads. Can this one be installed?
I strongly dislike and distrust CDs obtained this way. The sellers generally care far more about maximizing profit than making a good product and almost universally will do high speed burns. High speed burns are well known to cause random and arbitrary booting problems on Linux CDs. Unless I hear back otherwise, this belief is further confirmed with your experience with Knoppix 5.1.1. You likely could have bought an inexpensive burner for what you paid for a few CDs, and you would now still have the burner as well as good CDs.

As to is 3.7 can be installed, there are two schools of thought on this. Some think it can. I'm in the other school. See answer #2 for details.

It sounds like your system is a 486 33mhz based system. Yea, pretty old, but the 256 meg of memory should at least help. I would suggest using 3.7 as a live CD and if you want to install Linux try installing Debian Etch. Since you indicate that you use ethernet I'll assume that you have a high speed connection. In that case I suggest a net-install of Etch. Don't buy a copy (that could present the same high speed burn issue), get a friend to download the Debian Etch i386 ISO file and burn it at slow speed as an image to a CD, or just get a burner and do it yourself. You then install most of what you need or want from the Internet. Make sure you pick the desktop install option during the install (it will be asked after a good part of the basic system is installed). It will install gnome, not KDE, but KDE can then easily be installed later if you wish. Gnome may be a better gui for that system anyway.