Why did I decide to do this? Completely sucked two days of my life. Who knew that the lack of a CDROM, or more precisely, a reliably working CDROM, would have made this so difficult. I doesn’t seem unreasonable to be able to perform an install from any medium. Having found DOS drivers for USB devices, including a thumb drive, It really thought this was going to be a snap. In the end the USB CDROM drive performed long enough for the installation to work. So now I have a little 10″ IBM Thinkpad 240 running Linux. It’s just a shame that the battery life on this little thing is about 10 minutes!