Choosing an operating system

Faced with somewhat modest hardware and limited storage space, I started looking for Linux distributions that were optimized to make the most of older hardware, limited storage etc. I've used Mandrake (now Mandriva), Red Hat, SuSe, Ubuntu, Yellowdog and Knoppix previously, but decided that none of them would be appropriate - they have all the bells and whistles and are great in their own ways, but would probably run quite slow on my machine.

So I read up on the following:
Vector linux
Zenwalk
Damn Small Linux (DSL)
Puppy Linux

Of these, it seemed that DSL and Puppy were most likely to do what I wanted right out of the box. Both optimized for slower hardware, both live cd distros and both can run in RAM with little or no tweaking.

Since the Lifebook has no CD or floppy drive (and is too old to boot from floppy), I decided that the easiest option would be to borrow my neighbor's desktop machine to do the install. I concentrated on Puppy to start with, since it has a Universal Installer script - which even includes an option for installing to "Compact Flash card in USB card reader, to be moved to CF/IDE adapter". I mean, it's like it was written just for me!!

Except.. the Puppy installer doesn't install the boot loader for you. It ends with something like: "if you use GRUB, you might like to include the following lines.." S'cuse me? Beginner friendly? So I ended up buying a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter ($5) so I could install the CF card as hard drive in my friend's desktop and used DSL's "frugal install to hard drive" option - including setting up GRUB for you..

Even though the installer reported no errors, no matter what changes I made I couldn't make the laptop boot. Eventually, it turned out that my BIOS just wouldn't recognize the TwinMOS compact flash card. As a last ditch attempt before buying a hard disk, I purchased a cheap Toshiba CF card at my local OfficeMax. I made 3 partitions - 65MB for DSL, 150MB for Puppy, and the rest for data. This time the DSL install worked first time and booted the laptop no problem. I then installed Puppy, and edited the GRUB menu.lst file - and had a dual-booting laptop with DSL and Puppy.