It is a free application. It will let you run virtual machines on your windows computer. You can find "appliances" or virtual machines of all different flavors of linux online (again, for free), download them, run them in VMWare Player and decide which distribution is right for you.
You can run several virtual machines at once (depending on the resources of your host computer). You can network them together and treat them as if they were stand-alone machines, each with its own operating system.
As old as that machine is,...I would guess it might not run any Virtual instructions....didn’t see what processor it was...