LAN boot

I have an old laptop that I would like to use as a thinclient on a network. Hard drive is shot, cdrom is going out and no floppy drive. I am looking for an OS that can boot up and run exclusively from a network(I assume there is some kind of linux distro that does this). Google is not much help or maybe im searching for the wrong thing. I will take anything. Doesn't even need a window manager or anything except maybe text web browser or e-mail client.

linux is what you want

set your notebook to boot from lan

you also need a netboot image and dhcpd or tftpd.

if you have a linux box running dhcpd then you can tell that dhcpd to server boot image requests, if not, you need to run tftpd somewhere on your network.

you could just use any linux livecd and mount a network drive to save things

>>3
no.

#1, can you boot from USB?  If so, I'm sure you can make a thinclient from a suitably configured thumbdrive.