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I have read the article about XFCE, specifically the alpine version.

I have a very old Dell Latitude LMwith 1.5GB hard drive and 40MB RAM, but it will only boot from floppy or hard drive. I downloaded the ISO, burned it and copied it onto the laptop hard drive using my Windows XP machine, but it will not boot!

Is there a boot floppy for this distro or can any one suggest (in idiot terms!) how I can get this to run? Although the laptop is very old, it seems a pity to dump it just because I can't get an OS to run.

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Thank you!

Bob
2011-11-18 12:39:00
Thank you Danny, unfortunately the cd-rom is not bootable on this old dinosaur :(I did verify the CD before burning before copying to the hard drive. but I need a way to make the hard drive boot into the new operating system.
Danny Stieben
2011-12-08 03:03:00
I hope you find a way to boot it!
Bob
2011-11-13 18:46:00
I realised pretty quick that this would never run one of the windows 'competitors' which is why I was looking at the smaller versions. Once again many many thanks for your help
Bob
2011-11-13 15:41:00
Thank you both for your time, I think when I have some spare time I will disconnect the drives from our 2nd computer and connect the laptop hard drive via cable and see if I can install it that way from the live cd. I am a little nervous about doing stuff with my hard drive connected as I have had to re-install my operating system at least once trying to get this to work!
Richard Carpenter
2011-11-13 16:24:00
 You will run into a problem installing any current OS on the laptop, most full linux distro will be more than a gigabyte. Of course, doing that with Puppy or DSL would probably be the easiest for you. Puppy has the easier installer, DSLs installer is more old fashioned and can be a pain.As long as you select the correct drive in the partitioner it would be fine.
Jeff Fabish
2011-11-12 20:19:00
Hi Bob,Take out your hard drive, transfer it to a computer with a working CD/DVD drive. If you don't have any nerd friends who can do this, a computer technician definitely will either for free or very cheaply ($20 or so). Then burn a Linux distribution to a disk, insert it into the drive and restart. Once you've installed the operating system onto the drive, take out your hard drive and put it into your old computer. - Jeff
Richard Carpenter
2011-11-12 18:25:00
What exactly are you wanting to use this laptop for?The problem is that, this is going to be complex no matter how you slice it, trying to use a  newer operating system on this laptop. A full DSL Linux install would take close to 60 floppies. A network install of DSL might work for you, but creating that image is a not fun, or for me it wasn't. I had a similar project involving a old 486 server, so I am hunting down the floppy so I can make a image, but I have a mountain of them to go through :-)There may be a middle ground as well, There are some older distros that will work. You may not have the latest greatest, but it will at least let you do the basics.
Bob
2011-11-12 19:44:00
I really just want to get something running and thought from the description that this alpine linux would do the job. I really just want a simple os, as I said I have cables so I can copy files from my main machine (XP Pro) direct to the laptop's hard drive. I have tried puppy and dsl (files copied to hard drive too) but at the moment nothing seems to boot. I have had very little experience of using linux but would use this as a starting point.Thank you for your timeBob