[Inschool] Best settings for LINUX on students oldies

[Ralph M. Deal]

Hi, all,

I just took on the task of putting LINUX onto a raft of ancient machines
which my school is putting up for student sale.  These cannot have of
course
MS operating systems so LINUX is just the ticket.  I'm currently
installing
BS6.2 onto a Gateway 75MHz 16M RAM, ca 500M hard drive.  The process
is very slow of course but once I got the hard disk recognized, it is
going.
If I like the settings, installed modules, partitions, window manager,
I'll ghost this hard disk to the other machines.

Now the questions are:
1. Should I upgrade to 7.2?
2. Since most of these machines will have no CDROM drive, I'll want some
kind of boot diskette in case of problems.  What type of disk?  a
rescue,
a boot.img disk?
3. Should I try to put on StarOffice which will be terribly slow
OR should I have them use gnumeric and abiword, with instructions on how
to save them onto a floppy so they can be read on the school's MSwindows
networked machines?
4. Which rpm's would be most useful?  They will not have a modem
initially
and so must work with what I give them or have on a floppy.

5. I plan on running a Saturday workshop for the students/parents who
put
out the $25 necessary for a working system.  Should I try to teach
them command line UNIX methods?

Looking forward to lots of suggestions,   Ralph