[seul-edu] X-Terminals - Opinions sought

["Pete St. Onge" <pete@seul.org>]

This is sort of off-topic, but here goes:

I know of a school having a roomful of P100 and P133 boxes with bootable
nics. These machines would boot into Win3.1, and all apps would run
locally (in local memory space).

The intent for that lab is to upgrade the machines sufficiently to run
Win NT. Unfortunately, that means adding hard drives to all of the
machines, as well as licencing issues. And unless they increase RAM and
processor speed, this is going to be a very scary proposition. Either
that or a very expensive one.

What I'm trying to suggest to them as an alternative is to buy 2-3 
other machines to run as linux-based application servers (using X) and
NIS. One server would also run NFS. Since the local boxes are already
booting off the server, this should present no real client config
issues. Running NFS will allow everyone to have their own home
directories of substantial size (50 MB or so), proper network
permissions, and the money saved on client station upgrades could be
spent on larger monitors/PCI video cards, zip disks, etc).

Much of the software being run will be fairly unspectacular, mostly text
and spreadsheets. There will be other applications that would demand a
little bit more in terms of power (some stats programs as well as a
mapping program), but these will be rarer.

Based on this though, I would like to ask for opinions and a few
questions...

- Will running 17" or 19" monitors at good resolutions, say 1200*800
  or 1600*1200, on the clients impose a substantially greater load on
  the network (100BaseT) than running 15" monitors @ 800*600?

- If so, would having three identically configured application servers
  (good machines) be sufficient to ensure good servicing of the
  clients?

I'm not really looking for definitive answers here, rather I would
greatly appreciate any ideas or gut-feelings that folks might have,
particularly if they are based on their experiences playing with X.

I think I can make a very good case for this, not only financially, but
as a solution which maintains currency over the next decade (which
realistically is how long it will be in place) rather than until the
next version of NT.

Many thanks.

Pete

-- 
Pete St. Onge
pete@seul.org