Can i benifit from a cluster using wine or gimp? I have some pII and PIII ~500 mhz, with 64 megs of ram a piece, i've probably got 5 of them, maybe more. What i need to do is run Photoshop, but runing Gimp would probably be better, if benifits can be gained from vlustering these systems, how do i go about it? Also i want the cluster to do file storage and printer sharing over the network. And if nothing can be gained, i need some advice on setting up an intranet server that dosen't have access to the net. I'm going to use a 10/100 hub, will that work, or will i need a router. for the single server, the linux server will be interfacing with windows servers, but i really hate using SMB, so i'd like to avoid that, maybe ftp.

Do you want to cluster the graphics power or the computing power?

Interesting first question... I am not sure how well something like GIMP (or OO.o, or any other common desktop app) would use the cluster...

As for the second question, SMB may work better for your Windows clients than FTP would (although I believe that Windows PCs can now connect fairly seamlessly to an FTP site). Any config that gives your server an IP that can be pinged would work fine.

i want to use it for processing power, the video cards are fine for the stuff i'm doing.

Cluster HOWTO. Yes improvement can be gained from clustering. Clustering is usually for very CPU intensive tasks. However I'm not totally sure on if it will improve your speed of GIMP or photoshop. Webmin is a control panel that's webbased that can manage your clustering. Even if can be installed on the machines in the cluster/server farm and make it very easy to cluster tasks.
Funny, that's two posts in a row I've recommended webmin.

thanks i'll try that out. this is going to be a fun experience putting linux on a bunch of school computers .