Packerdbell has a very bad reputation which is mostly do to being proprietary. If you need to get new parts for it that may be a problem because packerdbell is the only company making parts for that system and you may pay a lot for replacement parts. 233mhz may be a little slow for running KDE/Gnome and I think the minimum is 400mhz for the GUIs on Redhat 9.0 but you can go to redhat.com and look up the system requirements for yourself. I know they do offer distributions that require less clock speed if you want to go that way.
This is a system you may be on the look out or parts to build one.
A case with power supply and preferably a mini tower if you are building.
A mother board. If building study this closely to see what it can support such as below.
A CPU (400mhz+) with a fan that mounts on the chip. Slower CPU if you use a linux distribution that runs on slower chips.
Memory chips (128 to 256megs+) most likely this will be SDRAM 100 or 133mhz but check what your motherboard needs.
Hard drive with 3 gigs to 10 gigs. You can go bigger than 10 gigs but I find 10 gigs is just right for doing most anything.
Network card 10 or 10/100
A video card (preferably with its own memory like a 16meg gforce or something but not important)
A Floppy drive
Keyboard/mouse
A CD-ROM drive (any speed) but this is not necessary if you install Linux through your network card.
Optional:
Modem
Monitor
Sound card/speakers
Now before tracking down any of this junk you should check the compatibility list at linux.org. Now a days its much harder to find hardware that does not work with Linux (besides winmodems) but its a good idea to check just the same. I left a lot of info out concerning each part but as you said you have a friend to help you with the build if it comes to building it yourself. You just need to make sure each part is designed to plug in and work with your motherboard (hard part). Putting it all together is the easy part
Of course if you build just take your time tracking down parts. You don't need to have it built by tomorrow and you have lots of time and good deals to look for. You may even find people at your church to help you out with some part of it be it locating parts, building systems or even using Linux!
