Should work okay as long as you have enough RAM. Also, an FPU would be a good idea. It would be more period correct if you used something like Yggdrasil or SLS for your distribution, though.

True to my word, I did install Slackware 8.0 on the 386DX@40Mhz (with 32Mb of RAM and a 387). It runs just fine (again no X, just console). The gcc version supplied with it is a bit archaic (at least in supporting proper pthread and stuff like that) and I could not compile some of my more ambitions code projects. But otherwise a lot of fun, I must admit.

Well, I have recently acquired an old AMD Athlon 64 4000+ gaming machine from 2005. I was tired of using Winblows XP and decided to install Debian. So far I am very happy with that OS and it fulfills my purposes (and then some). I have a lot of packages already installed (Xchat, banshee, Filezilla, Chromium, deluge, Claws-mail, etc) and it is epic. I also got a few custom themes for MATE, one was a Mac OSX-looking theme and a black and dark blue "delorean dark" theme. So I'm really happy about Debian and Linux in general and I hope to use it for many years.