Thumbs up to you! Glad to see that the very individuals we hire to teach our kids are open to look beyond "what everybody uses" and teach them not to fear unknown technology, but to investigate, study and embrace it. And maybe even enhance it

You've got my respect and support for your adventure
Keep us updated on progress please!

Do you have any "fast" computer on the network? By "fast", I mean >1Ghz. If so, then you can easily experiment with using those old PII/PIII systems as X terminals. Assuming you're using gdm on all the computers, all you need to do is configure gdm on the fast computer to accept remote logins. Then, restart gdm on the fast computer (rebooting works).

Now, on any other computer you select XDMCP login to log into the fast computer. It's quite zippy!

1 members found this post helpful.

I've got one P4 1.5 GHz running Ubuntu 6.10/XP Pro (Debian would rock on that unit). Cool idea, I like that, thanks:-)

Thank you for the kind words, I appreciate that a lot:-) Interestingly enough I am also starting to get support for my Linux adventure from our school district administration people (they like the idea of spending less money on MS site licenses).
Yes, I will post into this thread if I encounter something noteworthy to mention:-)

hitest, i'm late with this, but on page 13 of the sticky:

Debian Post-Install Configuration

at the top of this page, there are two howtos that might interest you:

1. Debian Install with the Business Card Netinstaller
2. Speeding up Debian

FWIW, i used a PII 266 with 128 MB RAM for 8 years until recently.

Good luck

Thank you, macondo! I am very much interested in how to optimize my older Debian boxes. I'll go read that documentation:-)

I've finished installing Etch on my older units. Etch installed very well on my Plll 500 Dell Optiplex GX1, it runs very well indeed.
I've encountered a problem with my last unit though. It has a 266 MHz processor with 192 MB RAM. It is an IBM unit running an AMD K6 processor. I think I forgot that the K6 processor is not supported. Is there a version of Etch that'll run on this unit? I would prefer not to run Ubuntu on this unit as it is deathly slow.

P.S. Edit, added later.
I wonder if the AMD64 net iso would work? Will a 64 bit iso work on a 32 bit system? Maybe I'm out of luck with this unit.

The K6 is not very different from the old PIII. I had a K6-2 years back (but no longer) and that did run Red Hat 8, later 9. So obviously Debian should be running. Try Sarge for now and see how that works.

Forget 64 bit disks. Not gonna work... You won't fill up your petrol car with diesel, right?

Just install Etch with the linux-image-2.6-486

I'll try booting the etch netiso one more time tomorrow, see if it works. Okay, I'll forget about the AMD64 iso:-)

Is that an option during the install process for the netinstall iso? Or will I need to install the linux-image-2.6-486 later?
Thank you for the feedback, macondo:-)

It comes with the 386 by default, afterwards, you can install the 486.

$ apt-cache search linux-image-2.6

I have done 3-4 clean installs on an old p11 266 with 64 megs of ram using a net install from floppy disks and I keep getting the 686 image. I don't know why but it doesn't seem to make any difference as the old laptop runs fine.

Okay I'll try. For some reason the k6 processor wouldn't boot the netinstall cd. We'll see what happens tomorrow:-) I was hoping that an F1 command would give more options to boot.

My experience is that Etch (the current Debian Stable) will default to the 686 image on a Pentium II or better, or will default to 486 on a Pentium. I don't know whether it will default to the appropriate image on a K6 processor. On my old Pentium, I had to use an option to turn off ACPI (whatever the heck that is) in order to get the installer to boot. Maybe you need to do something like that? IIRC, the option was something like "ACPI=off".