I've been working on a new project for the past few nights - I dragged a couple of old computers out of the closet and I'm trying to get linux installed on them.

The first one is an old P240mmx with 128mb of EDO ram. Has a 4mb video card and now a 10mb network card. I couldn't make it even see the 10gb HD I tried to install, so I yanked it and put the old scsi card back into it - AHA2940W. Then I added a 9gb scsi drive I had left over.

Since it won't boot to CD, I'm having 'issues' getting it to work. I had to eventually create a custom boot diskette with a boot-stub for Ubuntu (a linux version), and got it to boot and then install. It took over 3 hrs, and still is not correct. There seem to be intermittent drive problems - fairly worrying.

I managed to get it to boot, configured a root password for it, and just started a full update from the internet. Hopefully it will work and allow me to use the machine. If so, I can focus on getting the second one working.

The second one is a P133 with 64mb ram, a 10gb drive, and a newer motherboard than the other one, as it actually sees the hard drive. It's the CD I'm concerned with. It also refuses to boot to CD, and I'm getting hints that either the default drivers I have don't work with it or the CD is bad. I have a spare, might end up swapping it if all else fails.

If I can get both (or even one) of these up and stable, I'll install BOINC and run the world community grid project on them. worldcommunitygrid.org for more info. :)

Mainly they are just experiments, an effort to see if I can recover at least a little function out of these ancient machines.