Hi. I'm planning/trying to turn an old (1991-94) 40mhz 8mb RAM into a small telnet server to just run a simple game or two on, and I was wondering what a good, or even -usable- distro would be for it? One that could be installed from floppies, since I've yet to get an ethernet card for it, and maybe one that doesn't require a Linux Genius to install. I've already tried MINIX 2 (which was a little too confusing for me, plus it errored and died halfway through installation), and Slackware 3.3, which died before it even finished booting from the disks.

You can surely try out many floppy distros for this job
I personally never tried them but found out here a list of linux Floppy Distributions.

I think that since it's in floppy you won't have any friendly gui to set it up but if you follow the documentation of the site's distro you downloaded, it wouldn't be too hard just give it some time.

BasicLinux seems popular for this job since it runs on a minimal of 4mb ram.