Advice on mixed Linux/Windows student lab?

From: Jem Berkes (jb_at_users.pc9.org)
Date: 08/24/04 

Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2004 01:45:26 GMT

We have a small student computer lab at the university (50 users, under 10
people in lab at any time). We do need Windows systems for specific
software, but since we are engineering students there are many lab users
comfortable with UNIX (console or X). We are poor and have crappy hardware.
There is one "very powerful" x86 machine, two medium powered machines, and
many slow machines (Pentium 100 ish, little RAM).

Years ago, we had a purely NT/2000 lab but this was a disaster (server
security problem). Since then I installed a Linux-based firewall and NAT
gateway, and set up our very powerful machine running Slackware and Samba
as a NT primary domain controller (PDC). This Linux host has all the user
accounts and home directories on it. Also provides printer access.

The other Windows hosts can login using the Linux/Samba server and access
their files in their $HOME directories. This works flawlessly except for
some minor roaming profile problems I hope are corrected in Samba 3.x.

The problem is - while this setup works, it is an inefficient use of our
resources since our only very powerful machine is the dedicated Linux
server. With the remaining slow machines there is no way to have usable
Windows hosts [ NT4 sucks, tried it ]. But these slow machines are numerous
and have network capabilities, so I would really like to use them as dumb
terminals to full blown X (GNOME) environments on the Slackware server!

So my question is, what is the best way to set up these slow machines
(which have SVGA monitors) as fully graphical login terminals to the Linux
Slackware server running X.org? Ideally we want no data stored on those
dumb terminals -- I'm even hoping they can just boot off CD-ROMs. So users
would log in and see their own GNOME desktops on the Linux server, and run
all the applications remotely. If I can pull this off then those slow
machines will be convenient to use, fast graphical workstations! 

-- 
Jem Berkes
http://www.sysdesign.ca/

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