Recycling several old computers & servers
 

My company is writting off some old hardware. I have on my hands a dozen of Compaq desktops (Pentium II, 128Mb RAM, 6Gb HDD), and a couple of HP servers (Pentium III, 256Mb RAM with various raidable hard-disks ranging between 8 and 18Gb each).

I played around with various distributions on the Compaqs (DSL, Xubuntu...), but what I'm looking for is a way to easily set-up these workstations to network into one or two of my old servers.

Most likely, I'll end up donating the lot to a school, so I first had a play with Edubuntu. But its too greedy for the Compaqs. Could I turn them into dumb-terminals and let them access a server-based Edubuntu or similar? Also, being in France, it would be handy if the systems could be in French.

Any other suggestions on how to best recycle this lot of oldware is most welcome.

I am no expert in Linux (obviously) and do appreciate any help and links you guys could submit.

Gratefuly,

Lord Batman

You write English like an American. Very good. You would probably do well with Debian Etch, and a gnome desktop on the clients. The Pentium II processor is a little slow, but 128 MB ram is alright. The Ubuntus are debian based, but have a lot of window dressing. I don't think you will get KDE to run very well. Debian can also be installed as a text only system for server use. You can also compile a smaller kernel for the Compaqs, which will give more speed. If you don't know Linux, I don't think you will want to take a year to learn it just so you can give these computers to a school. I know it is a nice idea, but Linux takes time to learn. What I would do is cluster them together in a text only system and run the mprime program from mersenne.org.

Indeed, in my experience, Gnome or Kde crawl on the Compaq workstations.
I've no time or ressources to learn how to compile my own Linux kernel (though I'm sure it's a fascinating challenge) - but maybe I could find a distribution that acts as 'dumb terminal' on these PC, accessing a central server that does the work? The workstations would then only act as graphical 'thin clients' for a more capable central server running the system, for the school kids to share?

You might like to look here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ltsp/