Yes, NetBSD and OpenBSD work fine on the 2005 T42 but as you say video performance is low. Recent OpenBSD versions have had to reduce the range of binary packages (i.e. outside of the base and installed with pkg_add) on i386 because of the difficulty of compiling them (e.g. Firefox, Seamonkey needing dependencies that are hard to compile on i386, a point the poster up thread made).