Linux, Internet Cafe, Haiti...

[Jamon Camisso]

I'm going to be setting up an internet cafe in Haiti next month. The 
project is completely voluntary and I am almost solely responsible for 
the computery bits.

I checked out all the donated hardware for the cafe today and found that 
there are about 10 working computers, ranging from 486dx's to 300mhz 
celerons. The machine with the most ram I could find had 64mb. With this 
in mind, my immediate thought is to use a terminal based system and 
simply purchase a decent server to run the whole operation.

Most of the computers came from the Canadian Government, with NT4.0 and 
the dx'es from the University of Ottawa with Novell something or other 
and Win3.1. All the computers have network cards, some with co-ax and 
others not. All are ISA of course.

My first question then: how hard will it be to get the computers to boot 
from the network and how much (if at all) will their aging components 
affect both their access to the server and operations on the server itself?

My second question, which arises in part from the first: which distro(s) 
would work well in this proposed environment? My immediate thought is 
something like Fedora, SuSE, Ubuntu etc. My reasons for this are in part 
due to the fact that I'll be remotely checking in and troubleshooting 
and am familiar with those three distros, both as server and as desktop.

My third question: what type of network would work best? The cafe will 
have a satellite connection and will be carrying multiple voip 
connections for international calls. For most users speed will not be 
much of an issue since in the area I'll be working (just outside 
Jacmel), there is absolutely no internet or international call 
capability, so anything is better than nothing.

I'll try to make it out to the meeting this week? if anyone feels like 
giving me any advice or pointers.

Thanks for any thoughts,

Jamon
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