Putting Older Hardware To Good Use?

^Phantom asks: "I am a telecommunications major at college. Due to the lack of lab time at school I am always trying to practice as much at home as possible, the problem is I don't have the money for the latest/greatest things, usually I end up with scraps that 'helpful' friends and co-workers come up with. A common example is the Motorola Powerstacks I have on my floor now. I would like to put these to use, and I have heard linux can be made to run on them, but I have been unable to find info except message threads stating the problems that others have faced but with no solutions. I did find one HOWTO but when I followed the steps listed I ended up with a box that kernel panics on boot and no idea why. Is there any websites dedicated to putting old/odd hardware such as this to use?" You'd be amazed how many people out there are finding yesterday's powerful machines in a surplus sale and would love to figure out where to find hardware for it, or figuring out what OSes it will run. Are there any resources on the interenet that might help one with obtaining this information?

Comments

Xterms

[edwazere]

I'm not sure if this is really relevant - but (once you've got linux/***bsd running on old hardware it seems to make sense to run them as Xterms.

I've been involved in a project where we are using a number of low end pentium's without much ram as Xterms to a more powerful machine with a bucketload of ram running StarOffice and displaying on each of these old machines.

It seems to work well at the moment, we are still in the testing stage, but it looks like the management of the machines will be much easier than the current Windows systems elsewhere in the school.

As an aside, does anyone know of the best way of cloning the disks to other machines - they are all identical except for the size of the disks - will DD work? or will the disk geometry screw it up?
(I don't mind taking all the disks out and putting them in one machine one at a time if that's the easiest.)

Re:Xterms

[Stavr0]

Norton Ghost if you don't mind closed source paid software. It's got many modes of operation. My preferred way is MS-Networking-on-a-boot-floppy reading an image off a SMB share, but it also has a TCP/IP multicast client/server mode as well as regular partition-to-partition copying.
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Re:Xterms

[cblack]

I would use systemimager to install a full linux image on the machines. I use it for our cluster and it works great.
www.systemimager.org

It us understandable to be surly sometimes.

Re:Xterms

[technos]

You can do every thing Ghost does with nfs, dd and cp.. Shit, even SMB and NT on the backend.. The only real problem is the initial images, which require patience when being stuffed over the network.

Re:The problem...

[acroyear]

Another problem with 'net documentation (the infamous "HOW-TO" pages and websites) is the age. A lot of the how-to and mini-howto pages are still meant for older (pre 2.2, much less 2.4) versions of linux; some involve kernel configuration/rebuilding (like the iomega zip howto) that you don't need to do for more recent/up-to-date kernels (zip support is standard in most distribution's binary kernels). Others involve applying patches that were written for the 2.0/2.1 trees, and have no place in the current kernel to be applied.