Hi guys,

I have three perfect 486 computers that are just sitting around. They have different amounts of ram and hard drive space, but they just need to be plugged in basically and they'll go!

I have a small home network running other computers, 2 using using mandrake 9.2, a XP windows box and soon to be a suse box.

What I want to know is is there a Linux program that somehow combines these 3 486's computers into a "ONE" better performed computer???????

I could go on, but I'll leave it at that for now and see what answers I get. Thanks for any advice or help.

What you are describing is a 'cluster'. Never tried it myself, but try the following link for some info:

http://www.lcic.org/

Enjoy!
--- Cerbere

I have never tried it myself but would like to. Doing it doesn't appear
to be too hard but I am like most people, I don't really have an
application that needs it. What are you planning on doing with a
"cluster"? A search of the forum will give you a lot of hits. Good luck.

I would love to try cluster knoppix http://bofh.be/clusterknoppix/ on something like that. Download- http://ftp.sun.ac.za/ftp/iso-images/cluster-knoppix/
Cluster how to http://www.ram.org/computing/linux/linux_cluster.html for modern hardware
http://www.zorg.org/projects/cluster.shtml looks like what you may want.
good luck and have fun

I did such a thing a while back:
I had 2 486 machines, one pentium1 and one pentium 2 connected through a network, all running suse6.3 whit the beowulf software installed. I got it working, and the 'cluster' has rendered a couple of povray images.
The point is, 'normal' programs cant use this parrallell computing power, it must be specially written for it to be able to use all the computers at once..

so, besides a nice learning-purpose, it wasn't very usefull

Thanks for that!

After posting that I kind of figured that out be reading around. It's a shame really because surely a lot of people could benefit from linking a bunch of outdated and mostly free computers, rather than throwing them out.
I am thinking now of installing and builing "linux from scratch" on one of them and besides the learning curve, see how fast I can get it to move!!!
Thanks for the reply and advice