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.