installing linux

[Vortek, Eater Of Souls!]

Hello everyone,
I believe this question has been asked before, and therefore, I
apologise for asking again.
I'm wondering about alternative ways of installing linux.
I heard someone talking about installing over a serial connection, and
also heard about installing over a telnet connection.
I'm wondering which of these is possible, and with which distrobutions.
I have a pentium 166 with 16mb of ram, so any newer Redhat releases are
probably out, unless you can force it to install on a system that the
installer doesn't like.
I've heard that newer Redhat distros refuse to install on anything with
less than 64mb of RAM.
Any help would be greatly appriciated.
Thanks.