I became a member of Freecycle a few months ago to get some stuff for
my new duplex.  I've since seen a few used monitors offered there and a
few days ago, an old Compaq desktop with DamnSmallLinux pre-installed.<br><br>I
thought you guys might find that an interesting way to introduce new
people to Linux, as well as a way to donate old hardware to someone in
need.&nbsp;&nbsp; I would still offer stuff up to the KCLUG group first, since I
personally know many of you, but for items that this group is not
interested in, I'd put out on Freecycle maillist.
<br><br>Oren was bending my ear at the last meeting about LiveCDs and
installs for old PCs, for donations and charity work.&nbsp; My
recommendation stands with DamnSmallLinux and Puppy Linux.&nbsp; I believe
both can save/restore sessions to USB pen drives or to remaining tracks
on CD-R and RW disks that had ISO written as multi-session, if the PC
has a CDRW drive.&nbsp; They then can use some unionfs, file overlays and
possibly voodoo to restore settings, /home directories, add-on programs
that have been downloaded, etc.&nbsp;&nbsp; Or either distro would&nbsp; easily and
quickly install to even a small HDD, like a 1 GB or less.&nbsp;&nbsp; 64 MB is
probably a realistic minimum RAM for these with a Pentium CPU (More RAM
is always better, especially if ran as a LiveCD, up to 1GB).
<br><br>One other good use is a Linux Firewall using IPCop.&nbsp; There are
many cheap and easy integrated firewall, switch, router, wireless APs
out there, but for someone looking to learn some network security,
IPCop is a viable option for more of this old hardware.&nbsp; Again, Pentium
CPU and 32MB on up.&nbsp; Way more if you want to have a bunch of VPN
connections, but I run on 64MB and a 2GB HDD.
<br><br>Just passing on info to get a little more useful life out of some of this hardware that is gathering dust in our basements.