Hi,

I have an old IBM Thinkcentre A50p 8432 97U with about 500Mb ram sitting around doing nothing and I’d like to make use of it. Currently there are three active computers in my house, 2 laptops running windows xp and one desktop running windows me. We only have one DSL line coming into the house so every time someone want to use the internet they have to manually plug their Ethernet cable into the (badly located) DSL modem.

I would like to have the DSL line be connected to the thinkcentre and have the thinkcentre share the Internet connection wirelessly with the other computers. I would also like to use the thinkcentre as a print server so that all the computers can send documents to one printer. I would also like to use the thinkcentre as a file server so any computer can upload a file and then a different computer could download the file. This would eliminate the “sneakernet”. It would be nice if uploaded files could be organized into hierarchies and permissions used to specify who can download what.

Would like to be able to run the thinkcentre both “headless” and with a monitor etc.
I would like to power up the thinkcentre in the morning and have it set itself up without my input. I would like to run the thinkcentre without a monitor or keyboard or mouse most of the time…but if I connected that hardware I would like to be able to browse the Internet and access the usual GUI programs.


So to summarize, I want the old thinkcentre to be:

A file server
A print server
A wireless Internet server (I might also add another network card, if so I’d like to use it as a traditional Ethernet internet server as well as wireless)

I want it to be able to boot up and run without my input
I want to be able to use firefox to browse the Internet and use a graphical interface to run the usual programs.

I have absolutely no clue how I can make this happen. I don’t really have a preference for any particular linux distro. I have investigated this to some length, I’ve looked at ebox, weadmin, puppylinux…and I haven’t found a homerun yet.


Any help is appreciated.
If this pot should be elsewhere I’ll happily repost.
Thanks in advance.