KDE, GNOME and older Power Macs

[David Wadson]

After finally upgrading one of our departments to some modern Macs, 
I've now got on my hands an assortment of...

Power Mac 4400 (200mHz 603e, 64MB RAM, 2GB HD)
Power Mac 7200 (120mHz 601, 48-64MB RAM, 500MB HD)
Power Mac 8500 (120mHz 604e, 80-96MB RAM, 2GB HD)

I'm hoping to deploy these in a department that currently has no 
computers, but instead of running their current Mac OS 8.6, I'd prefer 
to switch them over to YDL 3.0.1. Not just for the stability, but also 
to be able to run OpenOffice. The machines as configured are lacking 
RAM, but luckily a number of places have 128MB DIMMs available for 
quite cheap so the memory can be bumped up to a more decent size.

The basic needs for the machines, in order of priority from most 
important to least, are:

IMAP-compatible email client
Word and Excel compatibility for general wordprocessing and spreadsheet 
tasks (nothing really complicated)
PDF viewing
basic web surfing (we can live without Shockwave, Quicktime, 
RealPlayer, etc.)

I've been using a variety of similar Macs, and some older ones, for 
running DNS servers, PPP gateways, mail proxies, network monitors, etc. 
but never with a GUI desktop environment installed. So, I'm looking for 
some advice and experience any of you may have performing such tasks on 
this kind of hardware. If it is possible to get a workable solution 
with this hardware, what's recommended - GNOME or KDE? Does one provide 
any significant performance gains over the other or is it mostly a 
matter of personal preference? My sanity might be best served by just 
buying some newer computers, but that won't happen until next year at 
the earliest. With this hardware, I have the opportunity, limited as it 
may be, to get some computers into people's hands now. Plus, even if we 
do get new computers next year, I'd still be giving Linux serious 
consideration for the operating system so my efforts deploying this 
hardware could be worthwhile if just for the experience.

Thanks in advance,

Dave Wadson
IT Manager
The Chronicle-Journal