I've done it

Managed to get XP Pro to run on my Mitac 5033 with 100mb of RAM and 4gb Hard disk. Its using 142mb swapfile which I tried to change to a USB pen drive thinking it might be faster than the IDE hard disk but it seemed to work but on examining the USB stick I couldnt see pagefile.sys on the drive.

I tried puppy linux wary 5.5 on this machine but it couldn'y identify my Belkin PCMIA wireless adaptor, which works fine on XP with drivers. Puppy linux even asked for the windows .inf file which I supplied from CD but still didnt work.

Any other flavours of linux worth trying, main problem I have apart from the wireless adaptor is the screen driver. XP before has no problem identifying the 800x600x16 LCD screen but puppy liniux I had to try several modes before it would display.

Arch Linux might be a good place to start. It is really stripped-down, though. You'll need to install loads of stuff to make it useful. It's available for the Raspberry Pi if you've got one and want to experiment. I tried it but decided that I preferred Raspbian (Debian). Linux Mint MATE is another possibility.

Cheers Mick.