Re: Is beowulf cool and should I setup a bunch of old PCs to try it out?

On Wed, 16 May 2007 04:27:10 +0200, Ohmster wrote:

We are talking like Pentium I systems, maybe 400Mhz or worse maybe

There were never any 400 MHz Pentiums, the PII came in about 200 MHz.

There are numerous distros aimed at modest and older hardware, just go
looking for some. People have set up Internet cafes with a few PII boxes.

I have run (and still sometimes do) Absolute Linux on a 233 MHz PII with
96 MB of RAM and a 6 GB disk. It works fine, although it slows a bit once
you have Firefox, Sylpheed, Audacious, and a few xterms running :-)

Another experimental machine of mine is a 433 MHz PII with 128 MB. It has
run Puppy Linux pretty decently, Absolute excellently, and I have also
used Slackware, Debian Sid, and Ubuntu on it. The secret is to install a
basic server setup and then add lightweight window managers.

So basically, you could set these up as quite decent desktop machines for
a startup Internet cafe, for a local charity, or for some less well off
people in your neighbourhood who can't afford the few hundred dollars for
a Vista capable machine.

Good luck,
Mark

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