Darn. I was hoping that the memory usage article would have many useful tips I didn’t know, like putting “use-lots-of-memory = No” in a file somewhere, but it says “put more memory in and use less heavy apps and services”, and I already knew that bit.
The memory usage article was a little helpful, but if you have a 200MHz Pentium I or K6 with 32MB of RAM, you may not be able to use anything newer than RH8 or RH9. Another thing with older hardware is that GRUB is unreliable on some older hardware. You may find that you cannot boot after installation if your distro does not offer the choice of LILO or GRUB. Ubuntu-family distros default to GRUB, as does Fedora, but Mandriva (at least last year) was LILO.
On some older hardware I have, Gentoo is the only usable choice, but be prepared to start an installation and leave it running for a few days. (Ruby took a week, which is longer than the full GNOME desktop environment took.)
— W^L+ 
I once did a stage 1 Gentoo install on a PowerMac 8500 (120 MHz, 64 MB of RAM, 2 GB drive). It went slowly but surprisingly well. PPC support had already been merged into the vanilla kernel, so I was able to download from kernel.org (a new point release had just been released that morning) and go. Several days later, I had a working Linux system with a framebuffer console and Internet access. I also managed to install Apache 2, PHP 4, and Wordpress without any unexpected issues. Never tried X.
There’s something magical about breathing new life into old hardware, hardware that you had given up on. I don’t know quite how to describe it. It’s very… tender.
— Mark
Now you can get the button: Re-Elect Rogers and Rogers Rabbit. Somehow we have to work three mentos on a stick into his campaign.
Oh yeah? Well I installed OpenBSD on a 25 MHz Quadra 610! :-) Just logging in took several seconds for the paranoid system to hash the password a zillion times. You couldn’t fit many processes into 12MB of RAM.