Any use for recently acquired old machines?
 

I have come upon the following 2 computers for free. Sometimes I just grab free computers (even if they're old) just to play around with them.

Here's the specs I have from the guy giving them to me:

My question: Are these useful for anything and/or expandable (I think I read somewhere that the Mac is somewhat expandable, or are they just fun museum pieces?

Possible issues:

- can I put linux on either?
- do I need an old distro, or would a current one work?

I look at it this way, at worst, they'll be fun to take apart and poke around in it and possibly sell for parts. At best I could make a really slow and crappy file server out of them.

Thanks in advance for the input.

Those are pretty damn old, but not worthless. My first play box was a 133mhz, 1.1gb, 32mb clod that did exactly what I wanted it to: allow me to learn Linux on very inexpensive hardware. Give it a shot, just don't be surprised if you can't get a GUI moving.

I fully expect not to have a gui on these. I'm not a linux jedi, but I am fairly comfortable with the command line environment. I'm just curious if they can be useful on a network at all as just a place to dump files or some other limited resource required job.

Any machine is useful on a network ;)

or possibly not, but it's worth a shot. You'll probably learn something and who knows, maybe you network needs a dedicated ping server...or two...

:)

i still use an old p133 for mail/firewall/squid/nfs(oggs;-)/printing... and it's working perfectly for our wg. four month ago i upgraded it from a p66 ;-). there are 4 disk ~40GB, 96M Ram. it's the only pc running all day.

sl mritch.

Unless you have a very large network, a Gateway machine does not have to be a speed demon.
For reasons of security, you should install the bare minimum. There are how-to's on the net for setting up a gateway or router. The author got rid of stuff that the distro's base install installed.

With an older machine, you weren't going to install the GUI and a lot of stuff any for another reason.

:D Just for fun, you could install a light weight distro and see how much you could get away with installing and using!:cool: