I'm using Mandrake 9.0 on my old PII 266 laptop.
'cos it has so little memory (64MB) I am using Blackbox as the window manager... which is actually quite neat and certainly doesn't use the resources that KDE or Gnome2 would. I will stick with it even when the memory upgrade arrives for the laptop.
It found my Xircom PCMCIA ethernet card without a problem though, and networking works great. Audio, however, doesn't work at all. Booting takes ages, but that is probably due to the useless old laptop hard drive than anything else.
I have also used SUSE 8, which is also a very solid distribution.
One day I will upgrade this 18 month old install of Mandrake 8.1 to something else ... possibly Mandrake 9.1 which should be out soon.