newbie - no floppy on old tecra laptop...

[Fred]

leslie,

Do you have enough ram in the laptop to run Mint 4?

Anything less than 256 MB, you are wasting your time. Even then it will be very slow, especially from a cd on an old cd drive. If you get it running on the cd drive you probably won't get it to install with less than 320 MB.

I have gotten Ubuntu, which requires the same resources, to run and install on old machines by adding ram temporarily for the install and then removing it after the install. The machine will run a bit slow but still faster than Vista.

You might try running a version that isn't quite so resource intensive. Translation, ditch Gnome and KDE.

Good luck,

Fred

[Fred]

Since you like Mint, and it is a very nice distro, you might want to try XFCE Community Edition. It is much less resource intensive but still a full featured distro.

There are currently two versions available. The latest is still in beta so if you want a solid, stable system stick to the non-beta version. If you like to push the envelope at the expense of some stability then use the beta.

DSL Linux or Puppy linux are also good on old low resource equipment, but won't have the feature set that Mint has. Just depends on what is important to you.

Good luck,

Fred