Q Hope you can help! I have a laptop which is not being used, but I would like to replace Win98 with Linux. It is a Sony pcg745 with a Pentium 266MHz with MMX, 128MB of memory and a 3GB drive. I have unzipped SUSE 9.1. I'm unable to find out how to get rid of Win98 altogether and totally replace it with LINUX. The laptop has a CD drive and floppy drive, but no DVD drive. Any help with this would be most helpful.
A With such a configuration you may need to be a bit careful about what software you install. It isn't a huge amount of memory, and not exactly a cavernous hard drive, so you may not want to install all of KDE 3.3, OpenOffice.org et al. Having said that, though, pretty much all the current distros will install on that equipment. The trick to removing Windows is simply to delete all the partitions on the disk during the Linux install. Some of the new distros may not let you do this by default as a precaution, but there will usually be an 'Expert' or 'Custom' option when partitioning the hard disk. Simply delete all the partitions before creating new Linux partitions. On this limited drive, I would recommend a 256MB swap partition and the rest formatted as one '/' partition.