Recycling several PCs and servers at once
 

Hello

My company is writting off some old hardware. I have on my hands a dozen of Compaq PC (PII, 128Mb RAM, 6Gb HDD), and a couple of HP servers (PIII, 256Mb RAM, several raidable hard-disks from 8Gb to 18Gb each).

I got DSL or Xubuntu to run on the Compaq, but I was hoping to set up a little network, using one or more servers, to eventually donate to a school.
I tried Edubuntu, but it won't run on the workstations.

Could I set up the Compaq as some kind of dumb-terminals to access the more capable servers?
Ideally, I'm looking for a French-capable system (I'm in France), with enough things on it to keep little school-kids and their teacher busy.

I'm a Linux newbie (obviously). Any suggestions and links would be most appreciated.

Many thanks

Lord Batman

You might want to check http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu
Since that is designed for educational purposes you don't need to worry about licensing issues.
Also have a look for more options http://www.schoolforge.org.uk/index...._for_Education

Don't know about the hardware - should work as long as you don't overdo it with big apps.You could try to add some RAM from machines to other ones and see what that does.

Thanks. I'll give DebianEdu a try and see how it runs on my old workstations.
The ram slots are maxed out in those Compaq though (2x64Mb chip), so I can't upgrade their capability. Is there any easy way I can configure the workstations to act as 'dumb terminal' (some kind of graphical relay) for a central 'educational' server?

There is a lot of info at google about thin clients but you'd need a server and I doubt that the HP's you got would do any good there.
I'd try fvwm or something like that as a window manager.Years back I had kde running on a 128mb machine but that lighter back then.