OLD Dell Optiplex GM+ 5100

[StealthyV]

hello all.

I've inherited an old Dell Optiplex GM+ 5100 puter, with a Pentium 1, 100mhz cpu, 32meg ram. it's running Windows 98, and has tons of ***on it from its previous owner...I'd rather have some flavor of linux on it, say Knoppix or Red Hat.

it's got onboard lan, and a 3.5" floppy drive.

there is NO CD-ROM drive.

I have been unable to figure out the network connection on this computer...I'm on a college LAN.

my question is, how do I reformat, and boot an .iso on that machine, WITHOUT installing a cd-rom drive? worst-case scenario, I'll boot Win2000...but with hardly any ram, I'm thinking linux with a sizeable swap partition would be better. there is NO usb port for an external drive to plug into.

thanks for any and all advice that you post.

~Branson

[John Prophet]

Chicks dig old Dells!

(to me, network installs are some sort of "black art"..you need the files on a server..then you need that special bootfloppy blah blah blah......easiest thing for you to do is boot with a boot floppy, format it with fat32 or whatever...then just take the drive to another machine and put the install files on it from there..then put the drive back and run the install)