Hi there!

Recently I've been given a task of making a small catalogue of books owned by a Sunday School. It's a charity school and got a few hundreds of books, and - probably - will have few more in the future.
I've been told, that there's a few old computers I could use, unfortunately there's no operating system on those. I know, there will be no money to buy a Windows, so the only alternative I could think of would be Linux / Unix (since ChromeOS won't be released before 2010). And that poses few questions, and I'm not familiar with Linux/Unix topic at all...

1) Is there anything pretty simple to run and maintain? (we need to keep in mind, that the people using this are not too much of a computer geeks, so I need something easy to use, probably with Windows-like interface). And I really mean: simple. This computer won't probably even get connected to Internet, and I only need an ability to run a catalogue program, maybe do some printing out of it;

and 2) Is there any software I could use with above? As for now, I have catalogue partially done as an Excell spreadsheet - maybe we could import that somehow? If not, i thought about OpenOffice to keep using the spreadsheet, it would be nicer though, to have some catalogue-oriented software.

Wow! That came out long... I hope you could get through it all...

Use the Database functions in OpenOffice. It is easily as capable as Access (if not more so!)