What to do with old machine... Install Linux

[shoerose]

I have an old 266 with a 4 gig hard drive and 128 meg of ram sitting around collecting dust.

I think I will install some form of Linux on it. What should I do, use the Linux box as a firewall, server or just let it be a stand alone system?

[JohnT]

Yes....:D

[ShieldWolf]

In the words of Ded Bob, "Smartasses... We must be in Texas. My people!" :D

Seriously, any of the above could work, although you'll want to run one of the lighter window managers instead of one of the big desktop enviroments. In other words, no KDE or Gnome.

I use a K6-2 350 as a NAT/Firewall with IceWm for the times when I want to use a gui. I did not set it up to allow remote logins for the extra security, or I wouldn't have loaded X on it at all. Then again, X might be a bigger security risk than ssh...

Use your imagination. If it's a spare machine, all you stand to lose is time(and maybe some hair), and you stand to learn a lot.

[shoerose]

Oh, I forgot to mention, I know nothing about Linux. I have downloaded Mandrake, Fedora and Red Hat 9 but don't know which to use.

I have 2 Win XP machines running through a router and was wondering if the Linux machine would be a better firewall than the router.

Also, can I network the Windows machines with the Linux machine? Will Windows allow that? I'd like to be able to access files between machines.

Man, I hate having to ask so many questions but hey, how are we supposed to learn anything?

[ShieldWolf]

Is your router also a hardware firewall? If so, it's the better firewall.

Can windows access linux machines? YES! Set up your linux box to run Samba to share files, or set it up as a FTP or web server. If you want to add a larger/second hard drive you can set up an mp3 jukebox. Make it a print server. Use it as storage to back-up files from your Windows machines. Literally, your imagination and perserverence are about the only limits with what you can do with linux.

As for which distro, Mandrake is my choice. Others will tell you Red Hat because that's what's most common in industry. Still others will recommend Debian/Gentoo/Slackware/Suse/whatever else you can think of. Since most Distro's are available as a free download, I recommend that you try several. www.distrowatch.com is a great site to visit to check out the latest releases.

Don't be afraid to ask questions, but DO search the forums and Google first. It's very hard to come up with a question that hasn't already been answered.

#When are we getting spell check??? ;) AND grammar checking...