I have just rescued four 44P Series 170 workstations. Most likely, the ram and hard drives have been removed, but I'm confident that other than that at least two or three of them will still work if I can install a hard drive and ram.

I would like to install Linux on them, but would be happy starting off with just getting one of them up and running. I think the first order of business is getting the case open. How do I do this?

Once I do get the case open, where would I find Ram? I assume it's different than a PC, but don't really know. What kind of hard drive will I need if none of them have one?

Am I wasting my time or can these be useful to me without breaking the bank to salvage them?

I seem to recall that instead of BIOS I'll need some sort of boot disk to make any changes to them so that they'll boot off of a cd. They do all have a floppy disk drive and cd drives. They also have video cards and I have a P260 monitor. I also have keyboards and mice(what's the plural for mouse).

Also, if I'm asking the wrong questions that would also be helpful. I have finally learned how to setup NFS in Linux so I'm hoping to eventually make them headless.

You mean some old IBM RS/6000's? That was some hot stuff...don't throw them away! I'm not familiar with powerpc hardware, but I imagine Debian is as good a place to start as any, seeing as you're already familiar with it.

Moved to Linux-Hardware