pc recycling with free software

[Michael G]

> I know that there are many gnu/linux distributions which can no longer
> even be installed on very old computers because of their size and/or
> distribution method; can you recommend any of the 100% free
> distributions for this purpose?

Depends on how you define "old". On a 10 year old system (say, a
Pentium II with 128 mb of ram) you can easily run the current version
of Debian even with the not bad-looking LXDE gui.

Gentoo Linux should also be able to run on pretty old machines (but I
think it woud be a pain in the a** to compile it)

DSL (damn small linux) is also aimed at very old computers, I don't
know, however, if it's 100% free.

In general it might be worthwhile to take a look at distributions for
embedded linux, they often have clever solutions when it comes to
limited resources.

Michael