Hi,
A company I do some teaching for has a load of legacy hardware, among which a Dell Poweredge 1300 server. Rough specs: Pentium-III 500 MHz processor, 110 MB RAM, 3 x 9 GB SCSI disks. This thing is a dinosaur, and horribly loud, but apparently it takes a meteor strike to wipe it. I like using it for training purposes, mainly to poke fun at the Windows Server trainer, who complained that 8 GB RAM was "a bit short" to run all his various services. :o)
The last time I used it, I installed Slackware 14.1 successfully on it (init 3, no GUI, various services like Dnsmasq, NTP, Samba, Squid, a LAMP stack, etc.). I wonder if that thing would be able to boot CentOS 5.11 in text mode. I vaguely remember the text mode installer requires a minimum of 128 MB RAM, but I can't seem to find some conclusive information on the subject.
Cheers,
Niki