What Should I Do With My Latest Old-School Frankenstein???
 

Our town was letting people dump stuff for free last week, so Dad and I went to the basement to pillage and plunder on the dumpster's behalf. Among the stuff we threw away were 2 basement brand computers, identical, each with 2.5 GB HD's, 24x CD-ROM drives, 32 MB RAM, and, the best of all, 233 MHz Cyrix x86 Processors (complete with MMX). I salvaged the RAM, the HDD's, and the optical drives, and sometime this week, and since I haven't built a comp in a while, I'll put them into a case with a 200 MHz P2 MMX processor (complete with SoundBlaster Pro 2 sound card). I'm gonna make it a dedicated something, but the question is, what??? I wanna try Linux, and have been thinking about maybe doing a classic gaming machine or a jukebox. Suggestions???

Except for the hard drive, it's perfect for an mp3 jukebox. Stick a 200gb drive in there and bob's you uncle. I think that SoundBlaster should work fine for mp3s.

You could run MAME off it and do classic arcade games, but... meh. I want to listen to music a lot more frequently than I want to play asteroids.

Jukebox is a great option. Throw it on your network (assuming you have one) and run your distro of choice with Samba to share the mp3's over Windows boxen and you've got mp3's at any PC in the house without taking up any storage allocated to anything else. Grab some Logitech or Altec Lansing 5.1's and a SB Live Pro and you can even set up 5.1 audio in your living room.

Yeah, got a network, that's what I was thinking. Since I'm using my laptop as a desktop replacement, I think I'll turn my Dimension into a gaming box. At the moment, I don't have any cash for a new HDD, but when I get the spare cash, I'll spring for a big one. I need a new DVD player, so I'll probably just throw a DVD-ROM drive and a TV tuner and turn it into a DVR.

Install and configure linux. One variant after another.
configure it to serve basic web pages over apache, learn virtual host configuration.
Get used to it's command line use.

Put it all on your CV.

Also, you could put a larger capacity drive in and use it to host a security server, capture web cam images from a cam set on top of or in your house.