NetBSD is perfect for reviving older, yet useful, hardware.
Today I noticed an article suggesting the use of Puppy Linux on older laptops. I know several people who have also had some success with Puppy Linux, so it may very well be a good Linux distribution to use on older hardware.
However, I do think it’s important to not forget about NetBSD. As is clearly stated on the NetBSD homepage: NetBSD is a free, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system available for many platforms, from large-scale server systems to powerful desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices. Its clean design and advanced features make it excellent in both production and research environments.
Due to its focus on portability, even to what are today considered quite ancient systems, it has remained a tight, efficient operating system. Yet it still provides all the power one has come to expect from a modern, UNIX-like operating system. And pkgsrc does an excellent job of making it extremely easy to install a very wide variety of software on your NetBSD system.
Over the years, I’ve employed it many time to put old systems back into use. I’ve lost count of how many old Sun workstations I’ve turned into mail servers, firewalls, Web proxies, or FTP servers via the use of NetBSD. There’s no reason for a company to shell out a thousand dollars for a new PC to perform such tasks, especially when it will sit there idle 98% of the time. So it makes good business sense to put to use older hardware that still works very well. And thanks to NetBSD, we can make this a reality.