I ran modern GNU/Linux on a laptop with a 333 MHz Pentium II processor and 96 MB of RAM until 2010. I still have the laptop and it probably still works, though

I ran modern GNU/Linux on a laptop with a 333 MHz Pentium II processor and 96 MB of RAM until 2010. I still have the laptop and it probably still works, though I lended its charger and I don't know where it landed. It was a bit slow. You had to avoid opening more than two or three browser tabs and avoid swapping at all cost because of the relatively slow HDD. You had to be patient. The computer was designed for windows 95 and 98. It ran Windows 2000 quite well. XP was slow. I was amazed by the fact that a live CD of Ubuntu 5.04 ran pretty good on it, with an early version of GNOME 2. Late versions of GNOME 2 were unusable on it. It also managed to run mandrake 9 with kde 2 (?) well too. Now, current distributions are removing support for x86-32. Debian would probably be the best bet (or slackware ?), if not a specifically lightweight distro. I tried Arch on it but I would not install a rolling distro on anything with a slow drive today. Too painful because of the updates. I wonder if its silicon motion GPU would still work under X11. I'm not sure the vesa driver worked on it. I remember having issues with X11 with this laptop the last times I used it. I used a pcmcia card for the Wi-Fi that I sill have. I needed to use ndiswrapper to use the windows driver on Linux. It didn't handle WPA. Fortunately, almost all Wi-Fi networks were open or encrypted with WEP. Today, I would probably need to use Ethernet, or the only USB1 port it has to plug a Wi-Fi stick. One web page of today would send this computer to swap hell though.