[Lancaster] Recommissioning of PCs

[Ken Hough]

Hi! I'm Having fun!

As Taylor is aware, I have been attemting to rebuild/recommission/raise 
from the dead the assorted PCs at the Folly.
This is involving mixing and matching of components from the various PC 
boxes and other junk lying around the Folly.
So far, I've managed to upgrade all of the five "Tiny" boxes to at least 
32 MB of RAM.  The CPUs in these boxes  range from a Pentium 75MHz to an 
AMD K6 233MHz so all will be OK to serve as "remote X" terminals. Even 
one of my own old 486 boxes (40MHz/32 MB RAM, running SuSE v6.2) just 
managed to this.

We also have an already working K6 400MHz / 128 MB RAM box although the 
hard drive needs sorting out.

In addition, I've so far managed to reconstitute the following:

Pentium 166MHz/64MB RAM with CDROM
Pentium 133MHz/64 MB RAM with CDROM

A DIGITAL Server box containing a Pentium Pro 200MHz/128MB RAM with SCSI 
hard drive and tape streamer. I haven't tested the streamer, but it 
shows up on the SCSI boot list. The on board IDE channel of this machine 
is DUFF, so I've added an ISA card to provide for the IDE CDROM from 
which I've installed Linux.

There is yet another box (Pentium 166MHz/96MB RAM) which show every 
promise of being OK.

This should give us a total of 10 fully functioning PCs, although the 
DIGITAL box is a perhaps bit imposing.

To set up for an "X terminal", hard disc capacity of 1GB is plenty and 
we have more than enough drives to go around. I'm presently checking 
these out. Most appeared to have Linux partions on them, but they would 
not boot, so where neccessary, I have reformated them (or am about to) 
before installing Linux on them. I've gone for SuSE Linux v8.1 Personal. 
Apart from having this to hand, my reasons are:

1. Ease of installation and setting up.
I've given up on Debian. By comparison with SuSE (and others), it's a 
pain! I've yet to successfully configure an X server under Debian. I 
believe that a communal working system must be easily maintainable.

2. Mandrake has a reputation for ease of installation. However, I've 
found bugs when installing and running v10.0. SuSE just works!

3. The SuSE installation programme "YAST" provides a single front end 
for most, if not all configuration requirements, so there's no need to 
remember the names of various config tools.

4. SuSE has been taken over by Novell and YAST has now been made "Open 
Source". Looks good for the future.

5. SuSE v8.1 Personal comes on three CDs and installation either locally 
or over a network is very easy to do. The minimal graphical installation 
without KDE requies only the first CD and fits well within the capacity 
of a 1GB hard disc. The only limitation is that with only 32 MB of RAM, 
the drive must be partitioned to provide swap space before installing. 
This is on account of YAST.

We are short of a few 1.44MB floppy drives (got stacks of 720k drives), 
so any offers will be helpfull.

Bye the way, I'm cleaning up the cases of the PCs as they are brought 
back into life. They look quite presentable.

I'm no expert on networked systems and "remote X", so the initial 
installations will be set up with an activated network card and X server 
configured for 800 x 600 pixels. By issuing the command "X -broadcast", 
the PC  should get a response from any X client (ie one running "xdm") 
on the network. At least it does at home!

Any guidance on this would be much appreciated. Also so would help with 
cleaning and sorting out the VDUs and actually putting the network 
together.

Regards

Ken Hough