Hello there, I am a student, who, while trying to increase my 'real life experience' to supplement my degree and pad out my CV agreed to help make use of some old, donated computers at my loacal Sea Cadet unit.

The machines are mostly very old, ex school computers, the spec is as follows

133 Mhz, Floppy, CD Drive, 96MB RAM, network card, 1.2GB hd
100 Mhz, Floppy drive, 16MB RAM, 200MB hd
200 MHz, Floppy, CD Drive, 64MB RAM, network card, 2GB hd
66 MHz, Floppy, Network card, 80MB RAM, 500MB hd
133 Mhz, Floppy, CD, 64MB RAM, 1.2GB hd
433 Mhz, CD, Floppy, Network Card, 10GB hd

There are a few more untested machines and also a myriad of components, inc two printers.

The sea cadets are a charity and cant really buy any computers due to limited funds so I am stuck with what I have and the more I can use the better.

They are intended to be solely used (If they can be useable) as word processors for the cadets to complete work for various examinations. Now, as I understand it, Linux can make better use of older hardware, am I right? I use Linux reguarly but only on a far newer hardware spec.

My intention is to a distro of Linux and network them to a printer, there is no internet and security is not a big issue as it is only basic word processing and nothing important is kept, they really only need to produce documents.

They ideally should have easy to use GUI (these guys are aged 11 to 18 amd have been brought up soley on windows) and need a MSoffice like word processor.

My question is can it be done on the specs I have? Perhaps us the 433mhz as a server to store the files to save space on the clients? Anyone suggest a small, usable distro for this purpose? or can anyone suggest anything else?

Thanks for your help

Mike

i actually have an old computer around with similar specs, i've been recomended Damn Small Linux, but i'm still working around the non-cd boot thing.

Other distros that i've came up to are puppy linux, muLinux and vector linux, i believe that puppy and DSL are the most popular(and therefore, more prone to have people that did what you're trying)

actually i'm interested in doing something like this, go posting your progress

There are dozens of threads on exactly this topic throughout the forum. Do a little poking around and you'll get more "advice" than you can possibly use.

66Mhz? A 486? You've got some hoops to jump through mate. The one that I think will give you the biggest problem is the one with only 16MB of RAM.

I've got a whole baggie full of old memory. If you can, post the memory specs for those boxes. If any of these are compatible I'll donate to the cause.

Believe it or not, if you're going to have a box sit around to just serve files you should use one of the lower spec machines. Since it won't have to run any sort of GUI a bare bones install should work adequately. That way you can give someone (like the guy that runs the place - wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say-no-more) the best box on the network.

If you're only doing word processing, try AbiWord. I think OpenOffice would crush these machines.