Looking for a distro...

Here's my issue.
The CD rom drive on my laptop is 90% shot. so it reads install CDs VERY badly. Also. it cannot boot from USB.

I'm looking for a linux distro that has an ISO that's <100Mb and then downloads the rest from the repos. I need it to have Gnome or Enlightenment (either as default DE or with no initial DE and can be installed)
I'm limited on space: only about 40Gb drive.
The computer is OLD (laptop) so compiling the software is not a viable option, so no Gentoo (and i suck at cross compiling and transferring, not up to doing it ATM).
DSL and other small distros tend to be designed as LiveCDs are not what i'm looking for, as they are more work to modify for HDD install than i'm willing to do.

It currently has XFCE added to a minimal Ubuntu install (the ISO was about 40Mb, then you download the rest) I guess I can re-do it again, but the initial setup with this method was a complete pain which i'm trying to avoid.

debian-504-i386-businesscard.iso 01-Feb-2010 17:45 36M (http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/5.0.4/i386/iso-cd/debian-504-i386-businesscard.iso)

debian-504-i386-netinst.iso 01-Feb-2010 17:46 150M (http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/5.0.4/i386/iso-cd/debian-504-i386-netinst.iso)

SuperMiguel said:

debian-504-i386-businesscard.iso 01-Feb-2010 17:45 36M (http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/5.0.4/i386/iso-cd/debian-504-i386-businesscard.iso)

debian-504-i386-netinst.iso 01-Feb-2010 17:46 150M (http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/5.0.4/i386/iso-cd/debian-504-i386-netinst.iso)

Click to expand...

I'd have to agree....You're unlikely to find a distro smaller than this that isn't a livecd environment. (that may or may not offer an installer)

Gentoo can be installed from a floppy, but that would take a long long time to compile on a slow pc. Debian business card image is probably the best bet.

The other possibility is to use a net install. This is how I do it... my netbook has no cdrom drive. I just set up a tftp server and put up a bunch of images (gentoo, ubuntu, debian)... I can then just boot off the network and install off the tftp server. It's also convenient because you can have rescue images like parted magic (which owns), pxe knife, etc.

This does take some setup work though.

There is one other possibility... take the hard drive out and install it on a different pc. Then just move the hard drive back. Just make sure you manually configure it or install it on a pc with a similar config.

Oh, and you could also install it on another pc and just use the cp command after booting from a livecd to move the whole filesystem over. this is basically what I do when I get a new pc.

1) Boot new PC with livecd
2) Mount partitions via nfs exported from the working pc
3) cp -ax for each partition
4) Set up grub... either chroot and do it from there or just use dd to copy the first 446 bytes from the mbr of the bootable drive to the mbr of the new drive (The mbr is 512 bytes, but the last 64 contain the partition table, so you only want to copy the first 446 to get grub working... if you don't feel comfortable, just chroot and use grub-install.)

Linux, unlike windows, doesn't care about being copied around between partitions or where you put files on a partition. It allows me to get a Gentoo setup up and running in just a few minutes on a totally new pc.

I just do a install from a USB thumbdrive. make it bootable and your good to go

The computer won't boot from USB, otherwise i would have done that long long ago.
I'll give the debian a try. I've generally not used it because, well, i like Mint.
But Debian offers this, and Mint doesn't.