I was wondering if you had considered Knoppix?
It can be run from the CD or be installed on the hard drive.
Requirements for this are pretty small.
i486+ processor
16MB RAM (text mode)
96MB RAM (graphics mode)
Bootable CD-ROM
Standard SVGA graphics card
PS2 or USB mouse
You can read up more on Knoppix at
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html
.
Thank you,
Andrew Robert
Systems Architect
TS&S Infrastructure Support - OpenVMS
Massachusetts Financial Services
Phone: (617) 954-5882
Pager: (781) 764-7321