LTSP

Like many people, stuck in my closet are some older computers that can't run the latest and greatest operating systems. The hard drives and CD players have been cannibalized into other computers. With the Linux Terminal Server project (LTSP), you can turn these seemingly worthless shells of computers into fully functional PCs.

With LTSP, computers boot and install the operating system from a server over the network. Since everything is loaded on the fly into RAM, a hard drive or CD-ROM is not needed. Applications look like they run on the local PC, but they are actually being executed on the server.

The server piece runs on top of most Linux distributions. You can freely download an ISO image of the software and burn it to a CD. The setup is fairly lengthy, but Novell provides a very good guide, if you wish to set this up on its Enterprise SUSE Linux 9 platform.

Volunteers from the project booted a seven year-old computer, with 64MB of RAM, in less than 45 seconds. The computer came up into a SUSE desktop and opening applications such as Mozilla or Open Office was extremely quick. If you have old computers lying around, gathering dust, then this project is for you.