You know, you may be right that modern computer activities like web browsing may be out of reach for this machine. But, having cut my computing teeth on the Amiga (and CP/M before that) I guess I never lost the old "hobby" computing spirit, trying to see how much performance I can wring out of an old machine. :-).

The limiting, practical factor in all of this is often economic and not related to technical issues. You can get a lot of parts for these old machines on eBay – and usually they are quite cheap. But a machine this old almost inevitably needs a new battery (and sometimes a new CMOS battery, as well.) The latter tend to be pretty cheap. But the main, system batteries for these older machines can be pretty expensive. For example, if I were going to put a new battery into this Gateway Solo 2500, it would cost the better part of 70 bucks, which is ridiculous.

To expand on my abrupt comment earlier I don't think it is economically viable* to use such old machines. As soon as you replace a part you could probably have bought a newer, faster, machine for the money -- even if the part is cheap the postage or transport costs can add up.
Environmentally too I don't think you're doing all that much good since CPUs of old aren't going to be less power hungry (some may be more so) but they have to be run for twice, or even three or four times as long to do the same job. That's also costing the user in electricity don't forget.
So, for this machine I'd say don't give it to a student but I'll not discourage you from finding something fun to do with it as a hobby. I'll even take an interest in that.


*In more affluent countries and assuming some access to the wider world and other caveats I feel compelled to mention after getting into this kind of discussion before.

Well! I use Debian 6 with KDE 3.5 (actually trinity desktop).

I had installed Debian Netinstall verison first, then all other apps.
@Aristocratic