I have an old laptop, IBM Thinkpad 380 Z, that had Mandrake 9.1 installed and running reasonably. It's a low-power system, with only a 300MHz PII, 96M of ram, and a 3G hard drive, but it ran Mandrake reasonably well.
Unfortunately, support for 9.1 is no longer available (with good reason, great advances have been made), and that means I can't set up either of my wireless cards, at least not easily.
I decided to try Kubuntu on it, and used the Alternate CD that's supposed to allow for older. less powerful systems. The results are pretty poor. The install didn't check to see that I'd passed a custom option to the kernel so it could boot (ide=nodma). It didn't detect the sound system at all (ubuntu seems to be having some serious problems with sound these days). It failed to detect the CardBus ethernet card at boot, although I was able to configure it. It doesn't appear to have adjusted it's package selection by much; I had to remove OpenOffice to get enough space to run the initial package update. The install took around eight hours to complete, the package update just finished after over an hour.
I really haven't had a chance to give the system a fair chance yet, but looking at how long the text-mode update took, I'm not optimistic.
I have the CD for DamnSmallLinux, and I will probably try that next. I know some of you have built linux systems on older hardware, and I'd like to know what you'd recommend for a system of this vintage. Surely there's something as capable today as Mandrake was five (?) years ago?