Old Computer Project Update :
The Pentium 240mmx unit is running Ubuntu - but may have hard drive issues - so far so good.
The Pentium 133 is also running Ubuntu - took a LONG TIME. First attempt failed - 1.6gb hd is not large enough to install the desktop version onto. It took 3 hrs to fail. Second attempt was with a 10gb drive, and the bios does NOT support it. Even once I managed to get the installer to run, it would not boot - drive was too large for that computer - period.
So back to the old 1.6 drive, and a new method I discovered for allowing a non-bootable cd drive to boot! First you make a boot floppy and it loads a program that THEN boots from the cd. Worked great!
SmartBootManagerHowto - Ubuntu Wiki is where I downloaded the files to create the boot floppy. Great tool if you need to boot a CD in a computer that does not support bootable CDs!