Laptops :: Micron Millennia TransPort

Ok, so, this old laptop was given to me. It's a Micron Millennia Transport with a Pentium 133 MHz, 16mb of RAM (expandable to a whopping 48mb), ~1.5gig HDD, a floppy drive, and a 4x CD-ROM drive. It was running Win95 and doing it quite well IMO, but there is no way I am going to continue running it . So I decided Linux was my best choice since my desktop PC has XP I figured its good to have some variety. Ok, now to the question, can it be done? I tried running it straight from the CD drive but 4x isn’t cutting it. It sat there still loading after a half hour. The only change I noticed was that the cursor changed from an X to the arrow. I tried installing it to the hard drive, but it didn't work out too well. I need someone to be so kind as to walk me through this mess. I need to know what boot settings I can do to get optimal performance. I don't care if DSL runs as plain old text; I just want experience as I am a computer techie in training. I also need help in creating the Linux partition. It says use fdisk or cfdisk, but I'm not so sure how I am supposed to do that. I've used fdisk plenty of times, but I am unsure how to make a Linux partition with it. Sorry this is so long in length, I type too much . ANY help is very much obliged.

-Chris