Having had a big sort out at work I've brought home 3 Dell Dimension XPS-450 PCs. I've installed Ubuntu Linux on one which went fine, everything works, network, sound, Graphics Drivers etc. and it can see all the other PCs & storage on my network and can use the Shared printers from other PCs on the network.

The Specs are:-

Pentium III 450mhz
756MB Ram
Pioneer DVD-RW (X4 Speed)
16 MB Graphics Card (AGP)
80gb HDD Capacity (60gb & 20gb HDDs)
Creative Live Sound Cards
3-Com 10/100 Network Cards.
5 x USB2 Ports & Firewire Card (I added this since it was in the cupboard).

On My network I already have:-

An Athlon 3200+ Windows HTPC
A Celeron 2400 UnRaid Linux Based Raid Data Storage Server
Several Windows PCs (Mine, The Wife's & The Kids PCs)
An Athlon 3200+ "project" LinuxMCE Core machine (I'm trying to work it out)

I'm wondering whether there is any open-source software based practical uses for these PCs I could have a play with? VOIP perhaps? X-10 Home-Automation (I have some hardware)? I'll consider any purpose that these PCs could run adequately.

Or are the just ready for the skip?

I have plenty of free time & love dabbling in new projects. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Mark.

Why not keep it as a "test" system. I have a Thinkpad T30 set aside just for dabbling with old and new operating systems and surely your system would be up to the task.

Why not take Plan 9 or eComStation for a spin?

If you want to do some serious stuff on it I'd recommend trying Xubuntu and go from there. Maybe have it as a torrentdownloader?

"It?" have 3 of them All connected to an old KVM switch.

I have no idea what either of those are, but that's exactly the sort of reply I'm looking for, thanks.

I installed Unbuntu as I already had an installer CD from my attempts to install LinuxMCE on another PC. I'll check out Xubunto too.

I don't know anything about torrents at all, are they legal?

Thanks,

Mark.

Oh, you have three of them, even better!

Plan 9 is free: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/
Somewhat primitive but fun.

eComStation is available on a Live-CD to try.
http://www.ecomstation.com/

I took PC-BSD for a spin just a week ago, it's a FreeBSD-based polished desktop system with KDE. Very nice if you've seen the horror that is NetBSD and/or OpenBSD-installation.
http://www.pcbsd.org/

And it doesn't stop there, there are tons and tons of useful and not-so-useful operating systems you can try out for free.

And downloading torrents can be both illegal and legal, it depends entirely on what you download. Just like, say, ftp.

Thanks for the reply, what I'm really after is application uses for these PCs rather than OS's to take a look at.

Applications on the lines of:- VOIP, X-10 Home Automation, TV Recording, CCTV server, Drum Machine, Music Sequencer (One PC has Creative Live Midi interface) etc. but obviously many of these these would be beyond these PCs.

Looking for a purpose for these PCs beyond an Internet terminal that's free basically.

I did think about using one of them as an FTP or Apache server.

Mark.

I have something of similar spec running in a cupboard at home. It acts as a caching proxy server, mail fetcher and spam filter among other similar things. There is always a use for these machines especially if you don't run a desktop on them.

To impress people and watch your network traffic you can install EtherApe on one of them. Looks cool and gives you a view of what traffic is flowing through your network.

http://etherape.sourceforge.net/

And yes, it's available among Ubuntus Add/Remove Applications.