The problem is that there has been so much development of the 'upmarket' versions that old things break. The manufacturers also pull new stunts, so that the new Toshiba V20s won't install either.

There are specific designed low resources versions, and you can always build any non supplied extras, but you need to know the line between the minimal 'extras' and the luxury 'extras' which need a whole bundle more resources.

The more recent builds of Ubuntu and Fedora are fairly high end, intended more for modern machines, and becoming less capable of use on very old machines. Anything below a P5 is now in the 'very old' class.

I've still got a full height 10 Mb drive in my cupboard... :-)