I haven't seen Multi-Headed systems proposed yet so....
I run IT for a 400 student Nursery through 12th Grade school in Bolivia. There are 2 Labs. A Preschool / Elementary lab with Windows boxes for playing educational games and a Middle & High School Lab with multi-headed linux boxes for OpenOffice, HTML programming etc.
In the Elementary Lab, kids love the educational games and learn English which is a second language for most of them. They love coming to computer classes. Networked games like Ages of Empires are particularly popular. Some other favorites are Putt Putt, Freddie Fish, Carmen Sandiego and Clifford.
The Middle/High School lab has always been a problem - mainly finding interesting things for the kids to do. Computers is not so popular. There is only so much Openoffice and Gimp you can do. What next? Programming? 3D Graphics? We still haven't found a solution....
A few years ago I looked at thin clients but dismissed them because of the poor graphics performance and poor overall performance. The machines were laggy and games were crap.
We went with multi-head machines. 3 keyboards, mice and monitors on each machine. Performance is indistinguishable from a single head machine. Games run fine - even 3D games if you use 3D accelerated PCI graphics cards - we use Nvidia GeForce MX 440's. Maintenance is VERY low. I have 39 stations but only 13 PC's to maintain. Students and teachers log in on any station and get their own environment. Home directories are mounted over NFS (performance is fine) and we use NIS for authentication.
One problem has been the inability to run Windows games (most of the best educational software is on Windows) on Linux. Wine doesn't hack it. I've been looking at Virtualbox and I think we have a solution (although no 3D acceleration - yet!). With dual-core machines, each virtual machine gets allocated a core and most of the games run with acceptable performance. When quad-core CPU's are cheaper, I can see a workable solution where 3 kids can be running 3 CPU intensive VM's at the same time with good performance.
I set up a K-12 school in Bolivia using 12 Multi-Head PC's driving 3 stations each giving 36 terminals. The original version used the Backstreet Ruby kernel patch and a hacked X server. It has been running stable for 2 years now. I have been trying out X.org which is stable with new (9631) Nvidia drivers (we use one onboard Nvidia graphics card and 2 Nvidia PCI graphics cards - around $50 each).
I looked into an X terminal solution but the performance was not good enough. We want to run kids educational games that have nice graphics and things changing quickly on the screen - LTSP is too laggy. The machines use Athlon XP 2500+ processors with 512MB RAM.
Ideally we would like to use VMware or Wine so the kids could play Windows educational games - they are lots of them and the kids love them. I have not been able to get the games to run on Wine however and with VMware, the performance is not good enough. We set up another Elementary lab with Win98 installed - PIII 750's with 128MB and 40GB 5400RPM drives is plenty for the type of games they run.
Good luck! Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
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I haven't seen Multi-Headed systems proposed yet so....
I run IT for a 400 student Nursery through 12th Grade school in Bolivia. There are 2 Labs. A Preschool / Elementary lab with Windows boxes for playing educational games and a Middle & High School Lab with multi-headed linux boxes for OpenOffice, HTML programming etc.
In the Elementary Lab, kids love the educational games and learn English which is a second language for most of them. They love coming to computer classes. Networked games like Ages of Empires are particularly popular. Some other favorites are Putt Putt, Freddie Fish, Carmen Sandiego and Clifford.
The Middle/High School lab has always been a problem - mainly finding interesting things for the kids to do. Computers is not so popular. There is only so much Openoffice and Gimp you can do. What next? Programming? 3D Graphics? We still haven't found a solution....
A few years ago I looked at thin clients but dismissed them because of the poor graphics performance and poor overall performance. The machines were laggy and games were crap.
We went with multi-head machines. 3 keyboards, mice and monitors on each machine. Performance is indistinguishable from a single head machine. Games run fine - even 3D games if you use 3D accelerated PCI graphics cards - we use Nvidia GeForce MX 440's.
Maintenance is VERY low. I have 39 stations but only 13 PC's to maintain. Students and teachers log in on any station and get their own environment. Home directories are mounted over NFS (performance is fine) and we use NIS for authentication.
One problem has been the inability to run Windows games (most of the best educational software is on Windows) on Linux. Wine doesn't hack it. I've been looking at Virtualbox and I think we have a solution (although no 3D acceleration - yet!). With dual-core machines, each virtual machine gets allocated a core and most of the games run with acceptable performance. When quad-core CPU's are cheaper, I can see a workable solution where 3 kids can be running 3 CPU intensive VM's at the same time with good performance.
Good luck!
I set up a K-12 school in Bolivia using 12 Multi-Head PC's driving 3 stations each giving 36 terminals. The original version used the Backstreet Ruby kernel patch and a hacked X server. It has been running stable for 2 years now. I have been trying out X.org which is stable with new (9631) Nvidia drivers (we use one onboard Nvidia graphics card and 2 Nvidia PCI graphics cards - around $50 each).
/ 14-Multiseat-X-Under-X11R6.97.0.html
I looked into an X terminal solution but the performance was not good enough. We want to run kids educational games that have nice graphics and things changing quickly on the screen - LTSP is too laggy. The machines use Athlon XP 2500+ processors with 512MB RAM.
Getting a stable configuration can be tricky. Chris Tyler's blog here:
http://blog.chris.tylers.info/index.php?/archives
has useful tips that helped me out - you have to wade through some crud to find them...
Ideally we would like to use VMware or Wine so the kids could play Windows educational games - they are lots of them and the kids love them. I have not been able to get the games to run on Wine however and with VMware, the performance is not good enough. We set up another Elementary lab with Win98 installed - PIII 750's with 128MB and 40GB 5400RPM drives is plenty for the type of games they run.
Good luck!
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.