My first suggestion is to go for CentOS as it is free and almost the same as RHEL. Also having a 64 bit OS lets you use a bit more of the installed memory
Then if you can simply install CentOS on these machines and have the network running you should be fine. I have been running experiments on something identical to what you are describing here. Niels Basjes On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 9:47 PM, Rody BigData <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I have some old ( not very old - each of 4GB RAM with a decent processor > etc., and working fine till now ) Dell Windows XP machines and want to > convert them to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for a Hadoop cluster for > my experimental purposes. > > Can you give me some suggestions on how to proceed on this plan? My > initial plan is to target 4 to 5 machines. > > Does the hardware on which Windows XP machine is based supports RHEL? > > Are there any other drivers or software should we install before > installing RHEL on this machines? > > How easy/difficult is this, if some one like a Linux Systems Administrator > is involved in this? > > > -- Best regards / Met vriendelijke groeten, Niels Basjes
