I'm still trying to get an operating system installed on an old laptop given to me. 4M RAM and 120M harddrive and it's proving quite difficult. I figured an older version of Slackware would work but in the limited searching the oldest version I found was 3.3, which won't install from the floppy if there's only 4M. It'll install from the harddrive, but well … that's the problem … I can't **get** it on the harddrive unless I install it from the floppy …
So it looks like I'm going to have to go a route I did when I tried installing Thix [1] on the machine—make a bootable disk image on my local system, then move the image over.
It's either that, or I write my own operating system.
Not that I haven't seriously considered that.