hi i have an old laptop now with win 98 and 16 megs of ram
i probably want to install linux over a pcmcia card network
but which distro is best for old laptops debian or an old slack version???

I would go for Slack myself but I'm biased! How much disk space have you got. If its ~2GB or more then you probably won't even need to get an 'old' version. http://www.linux-laptop.net/ might be a good resource for you

cheers

Jamie...

yeah but kde 3.1 uses much resources

and for the page when i try accsess compaq armada 1130 there is nothing on that page

Don't use KDE then... Use something like fvwm2 or olvwm... The're not where near as pretty but their a damn site lighter on the system. The only thing I've ever run KDE on is my works machine, and that only becuase it's too high a spec for it's own good. My other boxes are either fvwm2 or enlightenment.

cheers

Jamie..

is fvwm installed with slackware
and for the install i have to download a ehternet boot disk at slackware.com
but what do i have to do with the other computer that i want to install from
or do you think that i should the download packages from the internet

fvwm2 comes with Slackware, alongs with lots of other window managers.

If you are planning to install over a LAN then you'll need to download and image the network disk (network.dsk under rootdisks (I think!)). The machine you are installing from will need to be acting and an NFS server, and be exporting the slackware CD-ROM. There's a HOWTO for setting up NFS on http://www.tldp.org, its pretty straight forward. NFS installs can take a little while depending on your network so you might wanna put the coffee on before you start!

cheers

Jamie...

but if i can get the iso or the files can i then install from hardisk???

You mean export the ISO or files over NFS yeah? If so, yes. You could mount the ISO image on the server (mount -t iso9660 -o ro,loop slackware.iso /someDir) then NFS export it, or you could just export the 'slackware' directory that contains the disk sets. Slack is pretty easy going, so long as it can find the files its happy.

Or did you mean install from the laptops hard disk, if so I'm not sure. If you had an existing partition that contained the sources, that you could mount at boot time then in theory it should work, although I've never tried.

cheers

Jamie...

ok thx jamie

If the notebook doesn't have CDROM, you could consider removing the hard disk and using an adapter kit to connect to a regular box then install. Then reinstall the hard disk back into notebook.

ok il try that beacause the nfs was a bit more complicated