old dogs...new tricks?

[Andrew Stout]

Hello, YDL folks--

Andrew Stout here again, after another year-or-so hiatus.  I've 
subscribed again because I've got some old dogs and I'm wondering if 
y'all can help me teach them any new tricks.  Earlier this week I tried 
putting Debian on my Wallstreet powerbook, and it wouldn't even boot 
off the iso, so I've come back here, to the only Linux distro for 
Mac/PPC that I've ever had any measure of success with, to see what 
y'all have to say about this:

I have or could easily acquire the following machines, and I'm 
wondering if I could do anything useful or interesting [1] with any of 
them:

1. G3 PowerBook "Wallstreet" 233MHz, 20Gb HD, 288Mb RAM (, flaky CD-ROM 
and shot battery, external SCSI 8Gb HD and 4x CD-R)
- I had a usable YDL installation on this one (though never used it 
much), but sometime between August and December it stopped booting and 
I don't know why.  It's no longer my primary machine, so I could blow 
things away and start over with impunity.  Relative to the others on 
this list, this is the easy one, I think.

2. Power Mac 7300/something
3. Power Mac 7200/something
- These are the two I'm most curious about.  I don't actually have 
either of these in my possession, but I could get one or perhaps 
both...would they be worth the trouble?  What could I do with them?  
Will they run YDL or any other reasonable linux distro?

4. Performa 6214CD
- Am I right that this is a NuBus machine and it's nigh-impossible to 
get anything other than MacOS running on it?  Shoulda checked up on 
this before collecting it and storing it in my dorm room...

5. Performa 637CD
- my first computer, bought by myself in junior high, now sitting in my 
closet at home.  I doubt this could do anything useful...

6. Classic, Classic II, LC III
- and I don't actually expect these are good for anything other than 
stopping doors, but I thought I'd mention them as long as we're here, 
since they still boot...

Which of these are worth the effort of installation and set-up, and the 
space in the car when I move out of the dorm room?
Eager to hear your thoughts,

Andrew Stout

[1] I should probably define "useful or interesting".  I'm not elite 
system hacker, I'm CS major about to graduate from college, hopefully 
heading to grad school in AI/Robotics (if someplace will take me...) or 
perhaps taking a year off.  I have a primary computer (1 GHz TiBook) 
running Jaguar, and I more or less love it.  "useful" might include 
working as a 'music server' for my large mp3 collection, as a web/email 
server for some personal domain I haven't bought yet and don't know 
what I'd do with, as a machine to burn that oh-so-urgent CD while I'm 
watching a DVD on my primary computer, or as a useable terminal when I 
don't want to take my TiBook out of my bookbag or my girlfriend is 
using it or whatever.  "interesting" is a bit more nebulous, but being 
able connect to a miniboard in a lego robot might qualify.  I know none 
of this will come particularly easily, but I'm a busy guy, and I only 
have so much time to spend poking at linux on obsolete computers.