It is possible to use Mandrake or Fedora (well at least Redhat 9 one could) with a strip down install. There might be a minamilist install option as well. It would be good to customize the package install in any case, and only select the bare essentials, which you will need, regardless of the distro. The standard install would probably be too much; and one of the reasons I was iffy on the suggestion of win2k or what not, the amount of RAM in this computer wasn't specified.
Many Pentium 133s only had like 32 MB of RAM or what not (maybe 64 MB). In any case, the amount of RAM could be an important point here as well... This is as important a factor, as the CPU... Playing against this, is how new you are to Linux, how comfortable you are, and how much time you want to spend learning stuff (you could for instance go without a GUI, but would have to do things command line, and there will be more to learn there). There's a balancing act, no doubt. The good news is, if you have your laptop next to your PC, you could probably ask people here (as well as do some research online) to help figure out what might be confusing you at first.
One note however, you will want gcc if you plan on putting any software on there. And depending on how you can select this, make sure to get anything for C++, along with the header files (if these are listed as a seperate option). Compilers need these, as a fair amount of code which is supplied with a compiler is included in the .h files...and programers rather expect one will have them... When I was taking advanced UNIX last semester, we in part had tests with various configs, and some required us to install Redhat 9 in less then 1.5 GB of space and stuff, while giving us very specific parameters for customizing it. Many of my class mates left gcc out, and then ran into probs as they needed to comile and install stuff...
