On Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 09:04:12AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
The next next issue is CPU and memory. My home machines are GHz dual
core with GBytes of ram etc. However there are donated machines at
church that I wish to migrate from OSes as old as Win95. I know I'll
have to deal with 486 machines. There may be some 386 machines
(dealing with those on a case by case basis would be feasible).
You might want to look into LTSP.
(Internet access may be required
during initial configuration for the server). The thin clients (old
computers) run an X server and not much else. They display applications
that are being processed on the server.
I've used it for years and it works pretty well for everything except
watching videos, which tends to saturate the network.
Some the replies have prompted me to reinvestigate starting from the
netinst. It may be much more feasible than I though when it was
first suggested months ago. I've since done 15-20 installs on my
"for experimentation only" machine. I purposely do some things "the
hard way" as my intention is to learn the guts of Linux.
You can definitely use the netinst cd to get a minimal system. Just
uncheck all the software groups when it gives you an option to do so.
Typically "desktop environment" and "standard system" will be checked
automatically. You can uncheck both of them.
There is a smaller installation CD called the businesscard CD. I'm not
sure if it contains everything you need for a minimal system, or if it
requires downloading packages from the internet.