Probably. You'll have to hack the install procedure to enable swapping before it's being run though.
If you're serious about trying this, the fastest path is to install CentOS in a VM on a suitable machine that isn't going to spend a day in the installer swapping like crazy, and copy the image to a physical drive which you eventually stuff into the ancient low memory box.
I believe McGlockenshire was describing a relation (correlation) that very much so does exist (both openssl and the website are old & crusty) and that McGlockenshire does not mean to imply that the OpenSSL would become a better library if they updated their website with bootstrap (causation).