Installing on a Dell L400

Hi there!

I've got an old-ish laptop, a dell latitude l400 that I want to put linux on. It's currently got a fresh install of win2k, and considering it has a valid license (sticker's on the bottom! oo!) I want to dual boot. I just got this laptop, so I have no idea how the fresh OS got on there.

Issue is, it doesn't have a cd drive or floppy drive. USB booting doesn't seems supported. In order to attach a bootable cd drive or floppy, a special cable needs to be hooked up to a special port, and of course I don't have the special cable, and I'd like to avoid having to spend $30+ on it and have to get a special cd drive to attach to it.

Seems like I'm going to have to used partitionmagic or parted to resize the ntfs partition to 10 or so gigs, leaving the other 30 for linux. Then comes the tricky part. I think I might be able to set up some netboot scenario and install like that, or maybe physically pull the hard drive, load the stuff needed to boot and set up networking, and do it gentoo style.

Any other ideas or tricks I should try? I'm far more of a stranger to windows than linux, so if it involves some trixy commandline work, I can handle it.

Thanks!

There are Windows installers for both Ubuntu and Debian that will allow you to install without and form of bootable media.