ISO Recommended Install Method for Old, Old Machine

[Chris Schumann]

I have a ThinkPad 750P that I'd like to have run Linux. It "should"
meet the bare minimum for Ubuntu because it has a 486CPU, 36MB RAM and
a 5GB disk.

However, it has no CD drive at all, nor USB.

I did manage to get Ubuntu 6.04 LTS installed after installing Debian
(I think) a couple of years ago, and I got pretty close to getting
Hardy installed via netboot, but it gets a ton of timeout errors.

(BTW, GNOME in 320x200x1 is not fun. At all.)

On my first attempt, I made a FreeDOS floppy that boots and installs a
RAM disk. Then I made a ZIP of the netboot files and split them over
floppies, copied that to the RAM disk, and extracted the files, then
used linld097 to start the netboot process, and it started just fine.
I'm going to have to try that again to see how it failed. I think it
failed because there wasn't enough RAM to load the netboot files from
the RAM disk.

The second try, I basically did the same thing, except made a DOS
partition on the drive, with no RAM disk, so the netboot got much
farther along.

Any tips on getting Ubuntu installed would be most appreciated. I am a
coder by trade, and have written very low-level code, so I am
technical and can do a lot, but I don't have a ton of time to spend on
this.

Should this machine work with any of Ubuntu's installers?

Many thanks,
Chris