Being new to *nix, I'm not sure if my questions is so cut-n-dry.

In the Windows world I typically spec out using pentium processors in-lieu of celeron. I have just never had a good experience with celeron's. Everything from being slow to boot...to cetain applications occasionally locking up. I do realize or atleast accept the fact that the OS probably has something to do with these issues.

With respect to Linux/*BSD/Debian, how do celeron's pan out? I am asking because I found on ebay a guy selling a boat load of Dell 433mhz celeron desktops for less than $50 US. For the noob (that being me), buying a couple of these would make great starter machines as well as a FW/Router.

Or am I just wasting money ?

I think for routers or firewalls, celerons should do just fine coz they are just mainly doing one function and not running any GUI's. All you would need is a reasonable amount of ram.

$50 for a complete desktop is not a bad deal, so long as they come with RAM, a hard drive, and video. A 433 Celeron won't be a speed demon, but it would be a serviceable file or web server. -- J.W.

Celerons are just Pentium II, Pentium III, or Pentium 4 with half the cache. They will do find on none cpu intensive applications. In some applications, it will do better than a real Pentium II, Pentium III, or Pentium 4. In the Windows world, expect crashes and slow downs because that is the nature of the OS.

You can use a Celeron to get e-mail, word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and browse web sites.

$50 for a computer. I suggest e-mail the ebay seller before bidding.

Thanks for the reply's

Yes.. these are compete systems...no OS
Dell Optiplex GX 110 /433mhz / 128m Ram / 6gb HD / cd-r / nic
Desktop

Linux will run fine on those Celerons. Allthough not like lightening. Depends on the distro, window managers and the tasks that you do on them. Slackware will run on them like XP on a PIII 1GHz.
The more memory the better. Put in 512MB if you can. Some of those Celerons fix the front side bus at 66MHZ. That will slow things down a bit. The clock is also fixed so you can't overclock by changing jumpers.
I have a Celeron 366 doing duty with Slackware on it. For browsing the web, getting mail, watching streaming video it is fine. I have a PII 400 running Mandrake and it is a little slow but usable. I have a Celeron 400 running FreeBSD and it is a good usable machine.

Those machines are 5-6 years old so expect power supplies and hard drives to fail. Also don't forget about Dell's power supplies being proprietary from 96 -- 2000. Their ATX power supplies look the same but the pin outs on the outputs have been changed around. So if a power supply fails don't buy a standard ATX supply and put in it. You'll fry the MB and supply. If you get more than 1 of those machines you will have spare parts.