Hi, I was able to install Gentoo Linux on a very old laptop from (probably) 1998. It's not the most complete install, some stuff doesn't fully work, but it boots, and that's the most important part :)
The Toshiba 300CDS has a Pentium with MMX cpu, 48MB of ram (16MB soldered + 32MB extra). I thought ram would be the most important problem, but in the end, after compiling the kernel it used only 15MB on idle.
I installed and compiled everything in a vm. Huge thanks to this for pointing me in the right direction. It was my first time installing gentoo, so the guide made it very easy. It had a .config file for compiling the kernel, which was very helpful. In the end I compiled about 5 kernels before it actually booted. I was getting kernel panics about the system being unable to mount the root partition. I used the latest stable kernel as of now (6.12.21) and tested an older one as well (5.10.233; I was getting more issues on that one).
Then I had to image the drive. I don't have an adapter for IDE to USB, so I had to use another laptop to image the drive (USB drive -> other laptop with Plop Linux booted from a CD -> target drive -> Toshiba laptop). It was kinda annoying swapping the drives.
(yes, the PS/2 cables in the background are connected properly)
It takes about 2 minutes and 18 seconds to boot. If you want the see the whole startup/shutdown sequence, you can check it out here.
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