[lug] Recommendations For Older Hardware?

[Robert Racansky]

Despite the subject line of this e-mail, this isn't about where to
dump my old unwanted PCs, global warming, or inviting Jeffrey Haemer
over for dinner.

What Linux distributions would work well on old hardware, and have
Windows-compatible RDP/RDC clients available.

Since you can get VMWare ESXi for free at
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/index.html
(registration required, blah blah blah) , I've been thinking about
setting up one central server at home to run virtual desktops, and use
cheap, old hardware as thin clients to access the virtual machines on
the ESXi hosts.

If this works out for me, I'd probably recommend it for all the people
I've done home/tech support for over the years.

I haven't spec'ed out the old, cheap hardware yet, but one of the
requirements for the OS would be stability and ease of installation.
The point of this exercise is that I don't want to waste time and
effort maintaining client machines.   Note that I come from a Windows
background  -- which means I've spent a lot of time and effort over
the past 20 years maintaining Windows client machines for other people
-- and have very little practical Linux/Unix experience.  I just want
to be able to set up the host operating system and forget about it --
especially if I end up doing this for other people.