got 69 old pcs for 2€

Viro said:
try Knoppix for a bootable Live CD. You can also check out UbuntuLinux since they have a Live CD for Linux, but Knoppix has been around longer and so 'should' be more mature and stable.

that said, I've never had any problems with Ubuntu.
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Ahhhhh, Knoppix it was. Thanks Viro. Did you ever test it or how is Ubuntu? Do you think it makes sense to use it? How is the performance? And how can you play back audio CDs?
 
rbb said:
A couple of options. When you sell the PC's, figure out how much it would cost to buy Windows ME/XP/9x what whatever, and install/configure it. Then do the same for Linux. Then when you sell them, say this: x for a plain jane PC, y for a PC with Windows, and z for PC with Linux.

Personally, I have done similar with FreeBSD as the OS, then Blackbox as the wm. I just disabled all the consoles except one, then enabled ssh. Then in blackbox, just enable only the necessary commands in the menu. Then when they say they have a problem, but can still connect to the internet, I can ssh in and work. I set them up so that they can add users and what not. Its not hard to do, you just need to look at what you want/need, and find the best way to do it.
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I was thinking of win95b and even installed it on those hopeless cases where SUSE simply didn't want to install properly (mostly LILO boot-probs). Win95 runs pretty fine on those pcs but it's not free and I won't give anyone a copy of my CD. I don't know if it makes sense to add another maybe 49Euro just for the OS. Actually I wasn't planing to provide any kind of software-support for those pcs. I know how ppl will keep you busy with every little question. So, I will give them a working system and what ever they want to install, they can do afterwards and on their own. :)
My target group are the students in my university. They have ethernet broadband connections in every dormitory and the whole university runs unix/linux and SUSE is very favoured.
But you are right. I am sure there will be some ppl more interested to other os. Hope I will find some convincing words in that moment. ;)
 
scruffy said:
Have you tried installing Linux on one PC, then moving the hard drive over to another PC that doesn't see its CD-ROM? Of course, that doesn't make the CD drive useful to the buyer, but it at least gets an OS onto the thing...
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Hehe, I was thinking of this too. But I can't sell the ppl the CD-Rom as a cupholder only. ;)
But I did something else. Since I fell in love with yast2 (SUSE installer), I temporary added 32mb to those systems, that only had 32mb before. Yast2 requires at least 64mb and I really hate this non-graphical installer..
 
Zammy-Sam said:
Ahhhhh, Knoppix it was. Thanks Viro. Did you ever test it or how is Ubuntu? Do you think it makes sense to use it? How is the performance? And how can you play back audio CDs?
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Ubuntu is a great distro and is a snap to set up. All the normal media apps like CD playing, etc are installed by default. The only thing lacking is a DVD player, but since your machines only have CD-ROMs, that shouldn't matter too much.

With 32 MB of RAM, I still think PeanutLinux or DamnSmall Linux is a good idea since they come with lightweight window managers (IceWM, I think). Most distros these days come with either KDE or GNOME. These aren't the most efficient window managers around.
 
id reccomend simplyMEPIS if the machines can handle it. or, just keep them all for youself and make a beowulf cluster. :)
 
DanTekGeek said:
id reccomend simplyMEPIS if the machines can handle it. or, just keep them all for youself and make a beowulf cluster. :)
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.. and get the performance of a P4 2ghz? ;)
Actually I have a lot of FDDI cards to build such a cluster, but I rather sell them and get myself a nice powerbook. ;)
 
For a nice compromise between being a full scale graphical desktop, and being something lightweight that would be usable on an old system, you might want to check out xfce http://www.xfce.org

It's got a very nice file manager (actually I like it better than the kde and gnome ones), something that the really minimal environments like icewm lack. I don't know if it's included as an option with suse, but it's pretty well supported, so it should be available in lots of distros.

It's for sure available by default in NetBSD - another good, free, and generally lightweight OS. If you're familiar with the layout of boot scripts and the like in OS X, you might actually find another BSD unix to be easier to set up than a Linux.
 
Wow, so many options. Thanks scruffy! Xfce looks really nice. I will see how it feels on those systems.
Now that I have few system done, I will try out some of the proposed os here. But if Ubuntu or Knoppix will prove powerful and useful, it might be the easiest option. Those installations kill a lot of time..
 
Tested Knoppix this weekend and I got pretty frustrated. Worked fine with my Pentium4 and even looked really nice. But it didn't work on any of the old systems (tested 5). Got some filesystem error after the ide ports were scanned and it has nothing to do with the CD (burned on 3 different CD-R media to avoid any compatibility probs).. :(
Ubuntu is next ;)
 
Go for Ubuntu. I've tried it out on my Powerbook, and I *love* it. In fact, the only things it lacks at the moment are 3D acceleration, sleep and wireless. All of these are mainly due to nVidia and Broadcom not releasing the specs to their hardware. Everything else works beautifully.

I might even hold off (even miss?) a Tiger upgrade because of Ubuntu.

Despite all the praise, I say approach it with caution since it uses GNOME. While nice and very professional, GNOME isn't known to be the best performer.
 
I would be more than happy if it would simply load. Performance is something I don't care for those old systems ;)
 
There is a netbsd livecd that uses xfce as its desktop environment by default.

There's also a Linux distro called phlak (professional hacker's linux assault kit) that uses xfce as its default desktop. Not really a very mainstream distro, but you might try it out...
 
actually, I was looking at Linux livecds today for another project, and there is a morphix image - something like morphix-light-gui - that uses xfce4, and has a number of standard apps (mail, web, editing, word processing, ftp) chosen to be functional with a minimum of graphic fussiness. It's relatively small, only about 200MB as compared to a full 650MB cd image.

I don't recall the details, but it was pretty easy to find from the main page http://www.morphix.org

Incidentally, the phlak cd is based on morphix, it turns out.
 
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