[zapp22]

hard to say this in Title format
lotsa words

here's my dilemma.. None of the Linux distros can boot my older Presario laptop for reasons I don't understand. Mint can, but Mint is bulky, and Mint derivatives like Peppermint and Ice. So, is there a way I can use one of my Puppy distro CD's and get it to load/run Live-CD style AFTER booting up with Win XP?
there should be a way... right?
might have to burn some other type of CD so its not just a boot-from-iso ?
over my head.

thx for any suggestions.

[Squashman]

http://wubi-installer.org/

Have you tried running it inside a VM with Virtual Box?

[zapp22]

i thought about virtualbox but there is another user involved who is anything but technically-minded. trying to keep things simple and straightforward.
I didn't know wubi could handle any/all the distros. if so I'll give that a whirl. I'm assuming it just picks a spot of free space on the drive and uses the ntfs file sys?

[1002richards]

As far as I know, Wubi only works with Ubuntu based distros ... Windows Ubuntu Installer. Mint uses its version Mint4Win. I don't know of a similar installer for non Ubuntu distros.

Richard

[ocmtheory]

Virtualization seems like it'd be the most practical solution, unless you have limited hw resources.

[arochester]

It is several years since I last looked at it, but you could try Cooperative Linux (also known as CoLinux).

"Cooperative Linux is the first working free and open source method for optimally running Linux on Microsoft Windows natively"

http://www.colinux.org/