interesting PC recycling

[Brian Kelsay]

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.

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.   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.

Oren was bending my ear at the last meeting about LiveCDs and installs for
old PCs, for donations and charity work.  My recommendation stands with
DamnSmallLinux and Puppy Linux.  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.  They then can use
some unionfs, file overlays and possibly voodoo to restore settings, /home
directories, add-on programs that have been downloaded, etc.   Or either
distro would  easily and quickly install to even a small HDD, like a 1 GB or
less.   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).

One other good use is a Linux Firewall using IPCop.  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.  Again, Pentium CPU and 32MB on up.  Way more
if you want to have a bunch of VPN connections, but I run on 64MB and a 2GB
HDD.

Just passing on info to get a little more useful life out of some of this
hardware that is gathering dust in our basements.
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