You could give SliTaz a try… Choose the “cooking” package.

@Luke Maciak: I believe entering “dsl 2” at the CD’s boot prompt should give you a console logged in as root (runlevel 2).

Otherwise, NetBSD will, apparently, run on anything above 4MB RAM and 40MB HDD (8MB RAM and 200MB HDD is recommended). Now I don’t have any experience with NetBSD and it isn’t really Linux, but it might be worth a shot anyhow.

I used vanilla Debian for my ancient beast, only problem I had was the dropped firmware that I had to install myself since it isn’t in the Debian repos.

@Morten: Tried DSL but the CD insists on loadin X and for some reason the ancient touchpad on that machine doesn’t work under it. I don’t even know if this thing has a PS2 mouse interface.

@cAm: Puppy added to the list.

@jambarama: Oh, I know – I got it working under various flavors of Ubuntu many times before. But yeah – it was always a considerable effort usually involving ndiswrapper magic.

@Marius: Actually, I am well aware of that blog and read it regularly. That page sort of inspired me to start messing around with these ancient machines.

Hi,
Take a look at this blog http://kmandla.wordpress.com. The guy is pretty “fanatical” about getting different distributions on hardware similar to yours.

What you need for the wireless is b43-fwcutter and the firmware. Worked fine on my WPC54GS and supports a pretty broad range of Linksys wireless cards.

This link is good for instructions and links for the firmware although you should be able to find b43-fwcutter in your distros repos.

http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43

PS – I looked up the supported PCMCIA card list for DSL – bad news, you’re in the “Work, But May Take Some Effort” category and you’ll have to wrangle with ndiswrapper. Good luck.

PPS – related posts are listed as “Google Scholar”, “Not Always Chaotic Evil” and “Smurf Reproduction”. Pretty poor selection :)

I’d try vanilla debian. I’ll start up from a floppy. Then you’ll want a set of apt repositories on CD. Of course I don’t think you’ll get a WM working on it, and if you have to use ndiswrapper, that alone is probably going to eat all the cpu/memory cycles. Actually, I think you’ll need to find some form of embedded linux – like gumstix or android – that supports that hardware. Which I’m not terribly optimistic you’ll find, maybe you’ve can find some old Win95 boot floppies kicking around the net. DSL may work too, I know they have boot floppies, and the wiki says DSL supports a hardware specs that low [it says 8mb, 486 or better], but I wouldn’t be optimistic about getting a window manager on that either.

Try puppy linux.
I think Puppy might be upto the challenge.

Definitely not Ubuntu, but Damn Small Linux might work. I seem to always have to use ndiswrapper for my wireless adapters, so I’d be surprised if you could get away without it.