I understand, and installing linux on laptops, especially old ones can be challenging to say the least.
Well, as far as exact directions, thats going to be tough.
Does this laptop have a cdrom drive or access to one?
Does it have network access?
If no to both questions this will be very difficult, especially for a less experienced linux user.
You also have to understand linux of that time era when the laptop was made isnt nearly what it is now, and unfortunately the linux of that era is probably what you will have to use on it too, 502mb HD is pretty small these days.
Search for the original debian release or slackware 3.3 or 3.5?, both can be installed from floppies, keep in mind, they are pretty primitive, functional but primitive.I know the slackware release has floppy instructions in the rootdisk and bootdisk directories of the distribution directory, freely downloadable over the net, several colleges have mirror sites set up, I can give you a link later, right now I need to go.............
Email isnt a problem, but I doubt you will get an up to date web browser to run on it, old netscape will run on it, but no java support.Dillo will run on it, but its pretty limited in what it can do.Any of the text mode browsers will run fine though.
| 
Linear Mode
