is linux the answer?

[John Griffiths]

> 
>As others have said, forget KDE on these machines. I'd suggest icewm as a 
>nice lite window manager that behaves in a recognisable way for 'nix
newbies. 

is a GUI necessary at all?

if IIRC these machines are wanted to do IRC on the Jamboree Of The Internet
(JOTI)

there are good CLI IRC clients out there that would probably workbetter
from bash anyway

with no X these machines would run fine for these purposes. (and be easier
to set up)

ircII is one of many solid irc clients available.

> 
>It is also much easier to squeeze debian into a small space than redhat, 
>though if you lose KDE, you might still fit it in 500M. 
> 
>> 5. What is a good IRC client of linux? 
> 
>xchat is probably the one to use as it has a nice looking simple gui. 
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