I tried several current, popular Linux distros, and they all went to a black screen with my monitor telling me it didn't support that display mode. I searched many forums, tried multiple boot options, but they didn't help. I tried Manjaro, Mint, Zorin, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, etc. No joy. Even Centos 7 was a disaster. Only Centos 6 worked, and looked a lot like the RHEL 4U6 that was on it before. I have Zorin on a few other older systems, including a Thinkpad X41, which is about the same vintage as the football, but the old Zorin release didn't work either. The black screen problem is really infuriating. This pops up on multiple Linux forums with multiple suggestions. I'm not sure if the problem is the old graphics chip in the system, or the installers guessing wrong about the monitor's capabilities, but once it's in that mode, nothing helps but a reboot. The other thing about this system is that there is physically no room to install a better graphics adapter. It would be PCI anyway, so not that much better. The on board graphics are ATI Rage XL which does 1280x1024x24 just fine, and that's my monitor's preferred mode. The Rage is VGA only. The Rage is DirectX 6.0 and OpenGL 1.1. The OpenGL limitation may be what kills other distros.
I have not tried NetBSD, where the obvious answer is, “Of course it runs NetBSD.” NetBSD is a completely different family tree from the Debian/Ubuntu group of popular distros. It also looks like NetBSD has a bewildering array of packages. If I try this, I'll want to snapshot the boot drive with Clonezilla first, so I can retreat to Centos if need be. I notice that NetBSD uses Mesa to get around OpenGL limitations, so that may be a plus. At one point, I used Mesa to get around the fact that some VNC programs did not support OpenGL at all.