Well my friend gave me his old laptop, which is older than a thinkpad (Has no USB ports at all), this is an old Gateway 2000 Solo, with Windows 98 on it, so I switched the hard drive out, (4GB, gotta be kidding me) and put this 40GB I have, and it takes IDE hard drives, but replacing it was pretty easy except for the screws were stuck, and 1 was stripped, but I got it, and the optical disk drive is so easy to takeout.

Anyway idk the specs on this much, but I was wondering what Linux distro should I install on this I like DSL, and TinyCore Linux, but can't connect to the internet (gotta know server names, and crap, and all I know is TSUNAMI2 is what I want and the password, also I connect wirelessly, and we have a wireless router here somewhere in the basement), TinyCore so far ran the best, but Ubuntu won't work, and Puppy Linux just stays at the boot screen, so any ideas of a distro to put on there, were it'd run the most efficient. (It doesn't have a whole lot of RAM though like 64MB, but ruff estimate)

I don't know much about installing Linux, but maybe you can download it on another machine and burn it on a CD. Then you can install it on the new/old machine. As to which version to use, I have no clue.

I was thinking on putting Mac OS 9 on there, it's old, and dead, but I wanna give it a try on a virtual machine before I commit it to a whole computer as I thought it'd be a fun project.

You're extremely limited with 64meg of RAM. Sounds like you're on the right track though. You'd have to fall back to an earlier version of Puppy that would run in 64m.

8 of the best tiny linux distros

If the 40Gb drive is the one I sent you, it should have either Slackware or VectorLinux on it. If so, you'd be presented with a LILO prompt when you turn on the computer. You probably wouldn't be able to get past LILO with defaults but I could provide further instructions (if this is the case).

Mike, you are the most industrious kid I've ever met!

Well the hard drive you sent me I come across a screen that says "Operating System Not Found" so I reformatted it, and debating on putting TinyCore Linux on it as EVERY distro I've tried either got stuck on the boot screen

or wouldn't boot into it

So TinyCore only works so far, but not sure if I wanna do that yet. (Jolicloud didn't work either) either crappy Windows 98, or TinyCore Linux so far, and well if you know me, you'll know what's gonna be put on it.

The only reason Jason gave me this laptop, cause he can't figure out how to connect to the web plus the dude got a Mac Pro, so yeah I'm a little jealous, but this will be a gift to my mother (I don't get along with her at all, but not sure how much longer she hast to live)

First screenshot: old laptops generally only had a couple of valid screen resolutions/modes. The problem shown indicates that your boot loader (either LILO or GRUB) has specified an invalid one. You should be able to press SPACE and just use the default text mode -- but you will want to first boot into text mode (typically runlevel 2) so that you can work things out.

Second screenshot: my guess is that your laptop has an oddball Pentium processor (probably a Cyrix) which isn't fully Pentium compliant. Make sure that whichever distro you choose provides a i386 (e.g., Debian) or i486 (TinyCore, Slackware, et al) kernel, anything higher will not work with those processors.