Q:

Can I boot Ubuntu from a floppy?

I'm stuck on a really old computer with ~500MB RAM and a 6GB HDD.  It has Windows 2000. Being not from this side of the century (it originally ran Windows 98), the BIOS does not have an option to boot from USB.  It also does not have a CD burner, and I don't have any money to order a liveCD off the internet.
So I only have a USB port and a floppy drive to work with.   When I tried DSL, I had a floppy that contained the kernel and syslinux.  I realize that the Ubuntu kernel is too large to fit on one 1.44MB floppy, but is there some sort of program/boot loader that could load from USB from a floppy?

Yes, I tried Plop.  It didn't work because of my old BIOS.

Is there a program that I can use to boot Ubuntu from a floppy and a USB?
also:  I only have a power user account.  So a lot of things go straight out the window there.

A:

First, as you can imagine, Ubuntu is going to run slowly on that hardware, and I normally think of a 5 Gb partition as the minimal space for an Ubuntu install.
You may have better success with Lubuntu, it will use less resources.
You can probably boot an iso from your hard drive with grub4dos
I can not give you a detailed walk through on this as I do not have windows 98 to confirm this on, but the following should work.
Download ubuntu or lubuntu iso, put it in C:\
Download grub4dos from http://sourceforge.net/projects/grub4dos/
It is a zip file, unzip it.
copy grldr from the extracted archive to C:\grldr
Save a backup copy of c:\boot.ini , open c:\boot.ini with notepad and add the following line to the end of the file
c:\grldr="Boot Ubuntu ISO"

Save the file and close it.
Again using notepad, create a file C:\menu.lst save it as a txet file to C:\menu.lst (that is a small "l" and not the number "1").
title Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop
find --set-root /ubuntu-10.04-desktop-i386.iso
map /ubuntu-10.04-desktop-i386.iso (hd32)
map --hook
root (hd32)
kernel /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper iso-scan/filename=/ubuntu-10.04-desktop-i386.iso quiet splash --
initrd /casper/initrd.lz

That menu entry is for the ubuntu-10.04-desktop-i386.iso , adjust your menu accordingly.
Reboot and give it a try. If it goes well you should boot the ubuntu iso, it will be slow.
To un-do those changes, delete C:\grldr , undo your edit to c:\boot.ini, delete C:\menu.lst, delete the ubuntu desktop iso.

