Installing Linux on antique hardware

This time I'm working on an install for an IBM Thinkpad 760XL for a friend at work who wants to impress his son.

Not sure on the CPU for this baby, but I think we've got a 2GB drive and 64MB RAM. This machine cannot boot from the CD drive... and the floppy and CD share a drive bay, so there is some juggling to do.

So far, I have successfully booted the CD. This took a bit, but I finally realized that Smart Boot Manager is capable of installing onto the boot sector of that hard drive. It also needs a bootable CD-ROM in the drive to show up in the menu. I had trouble with flopping the physical drives once it ran - not sure if that is a user error or a defect.

You'd think that that was the end of the story, but I Fedora Core 6 refused to allow me to install since I didn't have enough RAM to even get going.

I'm trying Ubuntu 6.06 right now, and we'll see how that goes.

If Ubuntu fails, I'm not messing around anymore and heading straight for Damn Small Linux.

UPDATE (11pm): Ubuntu kinda went off into la-la land and I ultimately tossed it. DSL does boot, but the graphical mode never comes up. If I need to go text-only, DSL is at least an option, but it was requested to go graphical. From a little further research and tinkering, I can get the FC1 installer to begin installing. I googled around a bit, and it appears that FC5 may also install with 64MB of RAM, so I will start working backwords. Bad news is that I need to download the FC5 CD's now.