since I have no idea of how to get either the NIC or the CD-ROM drive to work, I'll just say what I did with an old laptop a while back.
Now that machine was even older, a 486-66 with 8 MB of RAM, so it should work much better on yours. It also had a 500 MB hard drive though. What I did was install a basic Debian from floppies. Yes, floppies. I had no CD drive for the thing available, and no network card at this point. For a Debian potato (2.2) that meant 14 disks. After I had the basic install done, got bored with it and definitely couldn't be bothered to copy .debs over using floppies, I kludged together a serial cable--
well, actually that's an exaggeration. I put the laptop on my tower, so the two machines' serial ports were maybe 25 cm apart, ripped the wires that connect the case LEDs to the pins on the mainboard from an old box, fiddled them together so I had 3 wires with a connector that'd fit on a simple pin on each end, and thus manually connected the two machines' data and ground pins. Hardware flow control? Bah! And I actually ran 115 kbps PPP over that. With the added problem that my desktop box on the other end had no proper Linux install at the time, and I had only metered dial-up. So on that side of the PPP connection was a fairly old version of Zipslack running off my Windows partition, serving stuff to the laptop off the Debian CD image via FTP.
Anyway, never mind that. If you manage to get a basic Debian installed from floppies (or Slack - does that still have install disks? I think so..?), you might be able to get the NIC working, if not, you could try a PPP connection (maybe even with a real nullmodem cable...) to get extra software. Most older 3com cards should work, though, I think.
Anyway, the hard drive should be plenty for that kind of thing - said laptop was dual-booting Win95 and Linux of a 520 MB drive, and I even briefly installed and ran X on it. And let it compile its own kernel, and other fun stuff. |
