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You might also want to look at a multi-seat setup. ie 1 reasonably spec'd computer, with several monitor+keyboard+mouse sets.

This is a fantastic idea. It would seem that the LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) would fit well with the original poster's requirements. He's already looking at using Edubuntu, which already includes LTSP, and he can use BerryTerminal on the Raspberry Pis as the LTSP clients. And going even further, he can use BerryBoot on the Raspberry Pis to support mutliple operating environments on each seat so for some classes they can use LTSP and for other classes, if they need it, they can use something like Debian or Arch Linux.

Laptops invite problems. Avoid them for kids, workers, everyone except sales people and CEOs - though even they should probably just access data back on a protected network.

Stay with low power desktops and use remote access tools - even locally to run everything on a central server - NX is best, not X/Windows or RDP or VNC. Thin Client Computing. http://www.ltsp.org/

If a student wants to bring in their own laptop, then they can load up NX and access the server.

NX works well over the internet too - extremely efficient protocol with built-in ssh security.

Doing all this prevents OS compatibility issues, ensures everyone uses the exact same version of the OS and tools. The admin controls which software is loaded. It also means that extremely low-end PCs work just as well as extremely high-end ones. If a PC breaks, then any other PC can be used just by installing a free NX l client. A bunch of $120 Pentium4 desktops are just as good as $2500 "workstations."

I've deployed 20K $5500 "hardended laptops" for adults. We had to purchase 10% more for swapping out due to breakage and loss. With kids, it will be worse - much worse. Having desktops available, but still under central control can minimize the issues. Sadly, there is no way to prevent issues.

You can recommend that interested parents buy the cheapest PC/laptop they can and make the ebuntu distro available, but all class work needs to be performed on the central systems.

IT is just like a car....you can run for a while...until you need gas. No gas, no energy to move the car. Pushing the car is against the purpose of the car. - Establish a plan with milestones and goals. Offer alternatives. Use open source. If somebody insist in $0 budget, ask him/her advice in how to do that and if he/she want to join you to make it happen. I don't know how to run a car with an empty tank with no gas. I've used LTSP once and it's cool to boot a class of 40 diskless PCs with PXE. Using a 100 Mbps network, they even boot much faster than any MS product. A little tricky for the graphic config. http://www.ltsp.org/

I did pretty much exactly this, starting in 2004. It looks like you have the opportunity to make this fun for yourself. Show some initiative and try something new. Off-hand, my advice would be:

1. Keep it simple, stupid. For a network that small, consumer-grade routers in combination with a few medium-grade switches will do fine.
2. Screw the cloud; host everything yourself. You don't want confidential company data on computers managed by strangers.
3. If non-Windows desktops are acceptable, I've had great success with Linux in combination with Linux Terminal Server Project. Saves boatloads on licensing costs and desktop hardware. You get to centralize all the management for free. LTSP comes integrated in Debian and a few other distros. There's a learning curve but it's very much worth it. XFCE makes for a good lightweight end user desktop environment.
4. Even where Windows desktops are required, have all the network services run on Linux. No hassle with licenses and restrictions.
5. Become fluent in Linux/UNIX shell. It's convenient and very powerful.

What you must run? If everything is web, a pendrive with a live distro could qualify. Other alternatives could be LTSP or even Chrome OS. Now, if this is for running windows you lose anyway in costs, security and probably even administration

What do your users need to run? Is it basic Web/Email/word processing, or is there something else thrown in? If it's something like that you could probably get away with a bunch of thin clients and a big central server. Check out LTSP.

As for servers, from the information you gave it seems like a basic file server would work as your media server. Make sure you have enough RAM, and take a look at something like Ubuntu server, should be pretty straightforward to get going for 20 people. For your Web server, how much traffic? The same thing applies, RAM is good, and Ubuntu will work for you there too. Also, how much traffic are you looking at? You should also look at tuning Apache (or whatever server you end up using) for best performance.

And of course, if a GNU/Linux solution isn't your thing or Ubuntu isn't your thing, adjust accordingly.

I hope they allocate some money for existing projects, personal favorites are LTSP and FOG Project; both of which are used in schools and my own personal computer lab for fun.

I'd hate to see the money dumped into new projects that cost way too much, and don't do half of what already exists out there.

Feel free to add your own, I can always use more bookmarks.

Jonah HEX

B.S.

I've been expecting something like that from the beginning. MS is quite strong in Russia, has numerous R&D centers, etc.

Maybe, just maybe... Linux is an awful desktop environment to work in and the community that surrounds it doesn't want to accept any responsibility or settle on standards.

You apparently have no clue what you are talking about. The Russian Linux/BSD community would strongly disagree. And they are setting standards perfectly fine as Arch Linux can be easily called national Russian distro. And it it quite close to the top on list of best desktop Linux distros. (Many Russians ISPs were BSD/Linux based from day one - amount of *NIX expertise in Russia is not to be underestimated.)

Especially considering that we are talking about educational sector, all the "Linux is hard" excuses are inapplicable, as thanks to LTSP it is much much more manageable and easier (compared to Windows) to use, monitor and deploy in environments such as school is. And there are literally piles of the educational software for Linux.

Though as I said above, it was obvious that MS would do something about it. It was more question of price, as highly corrupt Russian politicians probably weren't satisfied with initial size of bribes offered by MS. Or probably they were not pro-Putin enough but now amended their ways.

If so, I'd have a look at LTSP. At work we're re-purposing a bunch of old thin clients at our branch offices to PXE boot into a modern Ubuntu server. The setup is very easy under Debian/Ubuntu and you'll get a modern OS on every screen.

If his intent is to 'just make it work', this is the way to go. I've built LTSP style rigs going back to the days of KDE 1.x and 486's/Pentiums; good initial set-up and ssh have served. Once the BIOS settings are solid, there is little reason to go mucking there again.

No. Sadly, pulseaudio exists simply to copy Vista. Vista introduced per-application mixers and apparently this is a Cool New Feature that everybody supposedly wants, even if it's a shitty implementation that slows down what was a perfectly working sound system.

One of the hosted Ubuntu derivatives needed PulseAudio for its network code, to make their LTSP stuff work. Then Ubuntu unnecessarily started installing it by default, one version after they packaged it.

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=buy+diskless+workstations&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f

http://dosemu.sourceforge.net/

http://www.ltsp.org/

I think LTSP was what you were looking for.

Does anyone make a distro that is designed to forensically one's own network from outside

Did you accidentally the verb?

Seriously, why not look at ltsp? A different approach, maybe, but it ensures that all workstations are singing from the same sheet.

Linux Terminal Server Project

LTSP

K-12 LTSP

K-12 Linux in Oregon

Linux Journal

LTSP website

Certified clients and other hardware/support

The Linux Terminal Server Project is actually pretty good. And useful for a variety of things beyond just saving dough on the desktop end. Remote access is one that comes to mind. Sure, you could have a bunch of X terms, but this will work with ANY box with a PXE (hell even Netboot) NIC. You don't need virtualization or any of that garbage. UNIX was designed as a "multi-luser" operating system ;), back when mainframes were last in vogue. Xwindows is really quite good over a slow network and has been for DECADES.

Now, I want to stress that I am a proponent of terminals in only certain areas. A public library computer bank. A factory environment, where you want your server safe and securely away from sparks and heat. A customer service environment where the employee is only doing one or two things. My business ops people would have real computers for the reasons you mentioned. I want them to be accounting and developing even if the server is down.

But that would be about the dumbest, most inefficient, and most laughably bandwidth-intensive computer setup I can possibly imagine.

Some people really like it.

It's called PXE boot. It's real popular in some circles. My mythTV boxes all PXE boot from a common system image. It saves custom configuration time and makes certain things easier.

They'll make great terminals. All you need is a simple boot image to get each one to attach to the network and connect to an Linux Terminal Server.

At that point you've got a nice farm of small terminals with a big powerful server behind them. If you don't need this for yourself, consider donating the whole setup to a local school, church, or other organization that could use a low-maintenance multiuser computing environment.

I own and operate a movie theatre. Accordingly, I spend a lot of time sitting in my lobby waiting for shows to be over, waiting for crowds to show up before the show, waiting for people to leave after the show... I spend a lot of time waiting.
 
About a year ago I set up a Neoware Capio 616 terminal using LTSP. I made a special, narrow computer desk on wheels with slide-out keyboard tray and put the terminal, a 17" LCD monitor and a keyboard and mouse on it. It lives behind my ticket counter and I read all sorts of ebooks in PDF format on it. (And browse Slashdot.)
 
I was using Acrobat Reader for reading books but just updated my main computer to Fedora 8/x86_64 and since acroread isn't available in a x86_64 version I've been using evince for the past week or so.
 
(Yes, I know I could install the i386 libraries on this computer and use acroread that way -- I'm trying to avoid that if I can.)
 
I spent a year or so reading books on a Palm Tungsten E with Weasel Reader, but now that I have my 17" monitor I can get my books on-screen either one or two pages at a time. Times New Roman font, 15 point text seems to work the best for me.
 
I can sit back and read my book effortlessly, just push a key to go to the next page. The computer holds my book for me, it remembers where I left off the last time and re-opens the book to that page, and I can just push the whole works off to the side (wheels, remember?) when someone walks in the door.

I'm constantly running into people with expensive laptops or years of usage who truly want an appliance PC, and have settled into an uneasy compromise of knowing just what to do to get predictable effects, like reading email. These are people who call the computer a 'hard drive' or think that IE is 'the internet' because that's what it says in the start menu, often professionals who rely on computers, often in their 50's. The mere mention of changing to another operating system truly freaks them out, because they've invested enough braintime to not be so afraid of the damn thing. Even using a Mac is threatening because they 'don't know where anything is' [translation: where the start menu is, etc.].

Computers badly fail the 'appliance' test. I tell them that they should learn to use it, the same way a carpenter has to learn a table saw or plumb line, but get chagrined shrugs.

So, next week, I'm starting an afterschool computer club at my kids' school. They've just moved the whole district to Fedora via the Linux Terminal Server Project, w00t, no hardware replacement costs in my tax bill, so it's just getting interesting here in this small community, there's hope for the kids, more likely they'll convert the old farts by importing linux into the home.

He should talk to the guys over at LTSP. They've been doing POS setups for probably eight years now, using thin clients. Local printers. Local barcode readers. The software. They've got it all.

Take some old, small form factor PIIs and any modern server and you're in.

That depends on where you look. LTSP works wonderfully in many situations. It is especially popular in educational institutions. I use it myself in a couple of small business environments.
 
Again, it's a wonderful solution in many situations.

If the HR/recruiter people used Linux, then this would've been considerably less likely to happen. MS Windows is a plague, because it's so easy to corrupt the entire operating system. I doubt that Mac OS is much better, either (Apple likes to pretend security holes Just Don't Happen To Them).

Here's how these offices should be doing it:

Linux Terminal Server Project

That's how the City of Largo, Florida (USA) does it. They have just about every city employee on a LTSP terminal, and I understand that they simply don't have a virus problem. Even the so-called "Aunt Tillie" secretaries are able to do their jobs quite well. Furthermore, the city's IT maintenance and expenditure is way, way down from what it is for other comparable city governments--less than half. I've had similar experiences with LTSP and my own customers that Largo has had.

Linux is simply fundamentally better than MS Windows, *especially* in corporate offices.

Linux terminal server...

http://www.ltsp.org/ the core project.
http://www.k12ltsp.org/ a turnkey setup for schools just add crappy old throw away PC's and you have instant terminals for that one fast server.
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/linux _terminal_server TCO breakdown and executive overview of the above.

Implimenting a Linux terminal server environment is 90000% easier than citrix or windows, and is far FAR more stable. Many schools and business use such a setup. Autozone uses Linux terminal server in every store.

What, were you serving X11?
 
Something wrong with that?

Ubuntu would be very well suited for this with its LTSP integration: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP For help on server sizes see this page: http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/ServerSiz ing

This may be shameless self promotion but I hope its informative as well. You might want to look at deploying http://www.ltsp.org/ across your environment. It lets you pump out images to thin-clients across your network. This leads to a dramatic reduction in TCO and increased ease in administration, you're only managing one server. I also run a company that does LTSP deployments and remote administration http://www.inosolutions.com/. (sorry) To give you an idea a 100 computers can end up costing you only about $40000. Thin-Clients are great for corporate environments and allow you to escape that 4 year cycle, you only have to upgrade the server. You could also consider going this route with Citrix.

We are almost identical to you except we started in two-way radios and moved into computers. We have a Compaq 380 - dual P3-933 - 512m - 18.2 raid 1, that we bought on Ebay for $50.00 without drives. The 2 drives were $20 each used (with caddy).
 
We installed Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper) and the LTSP 4.2 iso. Our thin clients are a combination of Jammer-125s and Compaq DP 2000s (stripped of all drives and using an intel nic with built-in PXE).
 
The sad part is we bought the 5 Compaqs for less than the price of 1 Jammer. I expect the power supplies to crap out on the compaqs one day, but at $15 each its still worth it.
 
So lets see: 3 Jammers at 100.00 and 5 compaqs at 15 each we have 345.00 for the clients and 90.00 for the server. For a small business starting out, thats a pretty good price to pay to get everyone a workstation.
 
For pos and ticket management we used PHP Point of Sale and just extended it to include a ticket system and customer database.
 
  Blatant Plug: We custom code POS systems using phppointofsale as a base.

Vertical

Invented? only if you consider a second rate and late implementation an invention. Instead of sharing the same OS between two users, they had to license each half of the screen, how typical. MagicTwin did for XP what LTSP did for GNU/Linux and it actually worked. Perhaps in a world where screens cost more than the computer itself this makes sense, otherwise it's a real loser. I can imagine trying to split the average 1024 by 768 screen right down the middle and so can you. Just half your browser right now and see how well it works.

OLPC is better still. The software is all free, so you don't have to crowd everyone into a lab where they have to "share" non free junk like Bill wants. At less than $200, it may be cheaper than some screens. Everyone gets their own and gets to keep their privacy and dignity.

Quite a coinkidink, but I happened across this very topic during some semi-related web browsing yesterday. Others have noted the http://www.ltsp.org/ packages. You can buy ready to go systems using this out of the box at http://www.shoprcubed.com/products.asp?cat=46 and probably others. I didn't explore it, but they may sell the pieces and parts you'd need to add for that functionality on donated hardware. Upside = works right away with minimal configuration. Downside = kind of pricey compared to the OP's intended use of recycled hardware. I'd tend to go with others suggestions of piecing together an x-server and building thin clients out of less burly systems left over.

Get one server quality computer and load it up with Ram. The rest of the machines will be thin clients and can be just about anything down to a Pentium I. You can even run the machines diskless. You'll want a good 10/100 switch and at least a 100Mb NIC in the server. There will be a lot of information traveling across your network. I've done setups like this for kids in similar situations with donated hardware. One cool thing about this is that the students have the same experiences no matter what machine they sit down and log into. They don't have to be at one particular machine because that is where they saved their work. Definitely check it out. There is also a K-12 version for kids. Good luck. http://www.ltsp.org/ http://www.k12ltsp.org/

but is a different way to stretch junk hardware.

Have you looked at Linux Terminal Server Project? Any old junk makes an adequate client, memory requirements are something like 64MB.

There's an there's an active LTSP community, including guys use it in schools: www.k12ltsp.org.

Last year I installed a new system based on LTSP (http://ltsp.org/) on EdUbuntu. It was a few days before school started and I had the staff in my computer lab to show them the basics of the new system (teachers are usually not adventuresome like kids...). I was a few clicks into the presentation when a display driver started corrupting data eating away at the bottom of the screen. It turned out that good old Vesa driver did the job, but I did not figure that out during the presentation. What a flop I was! My boss dozed off! When school opened everything went smoothly except I did not have LDAP properly configured so some users had different passwords on different servers (not Debian's fault) and some memory going bad in one server. There are times when the software just has to work and that is much more likely with something that has existed in testing for quite some time.

Debian is one of the great old distros that just keeps getting better and not by adding frills. It is a large distro on many architectures supported by package managers from around the world. It is not hard to install as the reputation was. It is huge with many thousands of packages all smoothly (well, mostly ;-) integrated. I favour it for anyone migrating from that other OS, a new installation or on a large or small system.

One of the neat features of Debian Etch is the smooth set of packages for installing LTSP (See http://ltsp.org/ ). One can go into a school on the weekend, set up a server and support all the old equipment as thin clients whether they be iMacs, i386, i486, P-what-evers and manage hundreds of accounts by Monday.

I have been using Testing for a couple of months and there are few bugs. Nothing has prevented me from using it in production.

Congratulations, Debian.org!

I strongly advocate that every geek drop in at a local school or school division and talk to them about IT. The existing clunkers may make fine thin clients and a few new servers do not cost much to use as Linux terminal servers (see http://ltsp.org/ ). There are several distros that automate the conversion of a reasonable PC with two NICs, some extra RAM and storage into a Linux terminal server so that the old machines or new thin clients have only to show the pictures and receive the clicks. Thus a whole lab gets to log in and run on a single good server. Maintenance is down an order of magnitude this way as only one machine needs a file system. Debian, Ubuntu, SkoleLinux and K12LTSP have reasonable repositories for schools. These system do everything a school may need except allow full screen video to every seat. All the normal click/gawk/click stuff works beautifully. Teachers can easily monitor/control each student using VNC or whatever. I like to log a student out when they wander... or I block their favourite time-wasting sites. These are powerfull payoffs for schools who make a small investment in effort to install such a system. It is useful in a single classroom, a lab, or a whole building.

Schools that have a bit of money to spend can invest in a powerful server that can run a whole school over gigabit/s. A motherboards like TYAN S3992 (see http://www.tyan.com/product_board_detail.aspx?pid= 235 ) are just made for this with Lots of RAM, dual gigabit/s NICs, and dual Socket F Opterons. The investment in such a server is spread over every seat in the system and the per-seat cost can be $25 or so for the server, free systems donated by government or business ($0) or new thin clients such as NTAVO 6040 ($139) with LCD screen, USB keyboard and mouse really is very cost effective and easy to maintain. Having a single server is a little less reliable as a single point of failure but having fewer parts also saves money.

I'm probably going to roll out a test of the Linux Terminal Server Project for one of my healthcare clients in the next few months. We think thin desktops with no local storage and a single shared OS image is the way to go for healthcare providers that need to meet HIPAA privacy and security regulations. Having a single OS image has a lot of appeal to their support staff as well.

Install the clients as linux terminals. http://www.ltsp.org/

Connect them to a mosix cluster http://www.mosix.org/

Use rdesktop for those apps which still need windows. http://www.rdesktop.org/

You're may be looking for the Linux Terminal Server Project.

One of my clients is a community health center. We're looking into the Linux Terminal Server Project http://www.ltsp.org/ for precisely the reason that meeting HIPAA requirements for privacy and security is nearly impossible unless we can centrally control what's running on the workstations. In the next hardware tranche we're looking to go diskless with no CD writers and no USB support for mass-storage devices.

Having only one, centrally managed, desktop image has a lot of appeal as well!

I call CRAP!!

...

USB in a Linux thin-client environment blows chunks. There's a project to encapsulate USB over TCP streams; it's semi-dead and has some reliability and polish issues. There's no other way to smoothly support floppy or CD-ROM drives on your thin-clients, even if they have that hardware.

Funny, I have 3 clients. Each are actually old sub-500MHz pcs. Each has a floppy drive, a cd-rom, and a usb slot. I can plug in any of the three, and they show up on the users desktop (if he/she is using GNOME/KDE). LTSP refers to it as localdev (local devices)

From what I gather on LtspFS/local-device support, they basically invented their own network filesystem. This is wrong in two ways: 1) it would have been better to modify NFS, an established and reliable network filesystem; 2) this is the wrong level to abstract—it's too high-level. They should be exporting block devices on a block device level, not block devices on a filesystem level. Otherwise, you can't burn CDs or DVDs, rip CDs, low-level format a floppy, create a new filesystem on your removable media, or perform a consistency check of the filesystem on your removable media. Furthermore, they should be exporting USB devices on the USB level, so that you can use arbitrary USB devices on your thin-client, like scanners, printers, webcams, and so forth. Tell me, can you do any of these things with "localdev?" If so, I'd love to read the technical details of the system and see how tightly-coupled to LTSP it is. If not, it's perhaps a small step up from floppyd or whatever.

Just plan wrong. LTSP is not run ON thin-clients. It runs the thin-clients.

LTSP is a bundle of software that installs on the "server," may or may not provide scripts and binaries to run on the "server," and definitely provides a Linux kernel and userland filesystem to run on the thin-clients. Arguably, most of the value of LTSP is in the distribution it provides for execution on the thin-client. Therefore, it runs on the thin-clients.

The confusingly-named server, as you say, IS THE SERVER. It serve out the desktop to the thin clients. You don't install anything on the thin clients.

As a matter of fact, the LTSP terminology flies in the face of that of X11 (around for decades), ESound, and probably other software and technology that LTSP depends on. The thin-client runs the X "server." The thin-client runs the ESound "server." The programs on what you call the server, and I call the workstation or back-room machine, are clients of the X11 and ESD protocols, and clients of the servers provided on the thin-client. That's why I say it's confusingly-named. I'll admit a fault in my usage of the term "thin-client;" the traditional term would be X terminal.

Are we done with the capitals and abused italics?

I've tried this with Knoppix's terminal-server on the main machine, and PXE an old Fujitsu laptop. Didn't get all the way.

Can't comment. Don't know where you got stuck. I don't believe I did get stuck. It worked.

Also even with the tftp server, the process of creating a bootable image is a lengthy pain.

No, it's not. It's not much more than an apt-get install away in Ubuntu, as well.

The thin clients cost the same as the PC but do a lot less
If you stick with Windows RDP terminals, they can, particularly the Wyse Winterms. Now there are Linux terminals (that can be configured via LTSP to be RDP clients) as low as $90 in volume and $149. (The NTA 6020P is $149, although they have removed the line-item pricing for some reason).

So things are looking good for these units. The City of Largo has an administrator that keeps a blog that is interesting reading on how they are stepping up from basic terminals to using advanced terminals to add 3D eye candy, presumably driven by the cost savings over the past 5-10 years. I particularly like this posting that shows some daytime loads on the different servers.

I think they are thinking more of thin clients with some sort of remote desktop thing.

I myself would like to strive for Linux Termimal Server type of installtion at our work, check out this Story from Newsforge and the one year follow up which chroniclaes the city of Largo Florida government deploying Linux Terminal Server/Clients.

I think it's happening a lot more then you think, it just takes time to configure and roll-out.

As for the "New Bugs for Old" thing, we really don't see it that way. Sure there will be some minor bugs with the OS, but the switch would force us into using a lot of web-based software, which is what we want. That essentially removes our software-related bugs.

However that would save taxpayers' money, resulting in a reduced departmental budget, and we know managers don't like that sort of thing :-/

How? Easy.
http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/WebHome

Citrix for example was designed to run over dialup modems.

We're not talking gaming machines at this point. Nor video editing computers. We are talking about computers that can surf the web and can do office productivity stuff. This is a major portion of the desktop. Think corporate.

If you can boot the computer up into enough of a Linux X to display a decent graphics resolution and color depth, you can just transfer the screen updates to the client.

If we are talking about something like Office, you don't even need to have a complex rendering system. It's not to difficult to tell the client to draw a bunch of squares with numbers in them.

As everyone has pointed out, who knows what Google is thinking. But it is an option. It was an option 10 years ago, but Microsoft bought and killed off the companies working in this area.

The Groovix company offers a Debian based server with 4 or so screens and keyboards attached - with full telephone support. I haven't tried it, but it sounds like a viable solution for those who aren't linux experts.

At first, the kids complained about not having Windows games. But now, they like Linux games (some of our terminals can boot off local disk and have 3D cards to play Tux Racer, etc). They can play Windows games at any of their friends houses, but their friends come over to play Linux games.

Remind me again why we need Windows at home?

Ok, PC tax software is only available for Windows. Some years I fire up an old Win 98 box to run the tax software. Other years, I just do it manually. TaxAct and others offer free online tax software - but I dislike putting all my info in some companies remotely accessible database. When I fire up Win98, I pay $20 for the deluxe version. I wish I could buy electronic tax forms annually for $20 and run them on an open source engine. I guess the companies are afraid to do that without some kind of DRM.

It's only a matter of time until most schools realise the full potential of open source software, let alone things like LTSP. It just makes sense to use things like this in an educational environment. Reduced cost, reduced administration, more portability between students...

And given that the students will "know" Linux after they're out of school, it's only a matter of time until it starts populating in the business world.

First there was Apple in education...And then Microsoft. Microsoft is shafting the educational system with their inflated licensing costs, and trust me, educators aren't standing for it any more.

Like those above have said, check out the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) or a derivative like k12ltsp or Skolelinux. You can then keep using those old machines till they drop and then phase them out as they die. Many distros, like Ubuntu for example, already have LTSP client support.

EdTechLive has some excellent interviews on LTSP with staff that have rolled it out at their schools or, in some cases, districts. The sound quality in some of them is not so good, but the material is worth straining your ears for.