On 15 August 2017 at 14:32, Beartooth <beartooth@comcast.net> wrote:

         Some years ago, I bought an
         IBM-refurbished Thinkpad T42, meaning to
         devote it to use with a Garmin UPS, under
         Linux of course. It turned out not to be
         suitable for that.

                I put it into the guest room, where
         it also got little or no use. Until last
         week, it still had Fedora 22. I've been
         trying for days to get F26, or 25, or even
         24 onto it.

                       It demanded an i386, 32-bit .iso;
         and I did finally manage, after a lot of
         grief, to get it to seem to finish an
         installation. Upon rebooting, it says only
         that it can't boot what it has!

                As a last resort, I've been looking
         for a Puppy Linux version. The download
         page offers versions for Ubuntu (which
         affects me like sand in the teeth),
         Slackware (which I've never even seen
         running), and M$. Oh, and also for the
         eeePC.

I have an old i486 PowerEdge server with IDE disks and 
a serial port that I use to mainly to manage a room full of 
Ferrups UPS's and to clone IDE drives for use with an 
old industrial PC running Win2K.  

I settled on debian with a lightweight X11 configuration 
which has been fine for my needs:

https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch03s04.html.en

 
                Is there hope??

If you need internet access you should stick with a current
distro, but such old hardware is rarely worth the effort as
you end up dealing with failing hardware.  RAM, disk drives,
and cooling fans are prone to age-related failures.
 
--
George N. White III <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia