Hmm, I have a friend with a laptop with the same specifications, we had red hat 4 running on it fully installed for a while. After that we installed Red Hat 5.2 in console mode only style(no desktop, no X windows system).
Also, I do believe we had suse 5 running on it, a limited installation considering SuSe is one of the larger distro's available. Um, a compact version of NetBSD should suit you, or even An Older OpenBSD should suit your hardware. FreeBSD probably has something that would be fitting but my experience with FreeBSD is limited in comparison to the other BSD's and RH. Good Luck, if you are only looking for a console system than you should be able to install just about any older distro...