I had some old hardware a while ago on which I wanted to install an OS that would allow me to do something more than just browse the web. The hardware in question is a Thinkpad 560 with about 80MB of RAM, a 100MHz CPU and a 4GB HD.
Nowaday, most people would just chuck that away but I couldn't simply accept that this machine would just end up in some garbage dump somewhere. I tried to install debian which is not one of the heaviest of the Linux distros but version 3.0 was too "heavy". I tried finding 2.1 but that was a waisted effort.