[K12OSN] Demonstration site

[Jay Pfaffman]

I'm a new instrutional technology professor & Free Software Zealot. 
Since I got here I've tried several times to contact folks at the
local district to see what I could do to help out (I did have some
pre-conceptions about what that might be. . ).  They haven't returned
my calls or emails.  A student of mine is the building-level tech
contact for her school.  She said that she was in a training session
recently and she was told that a professor at UT was saying that you
could take old computers and make them really useful, but that this
would not be allowed at any of their schools.  I'm sure that the
science teacher who's been very happy to have 6 computers in her
classroom for a semester and a half would be sorry to hear this, as
they've been working flawlessly (save one bad Ethernet cable and the
time she changed printers but not printer drivers).

I have a second site where I installed K12LTSP 4.0 on 3 teachers'
existing workstations and gave them 5 machines each to use as thin
clients (which also have hard drives with Win2K on them if they can
get it configured).

I'd like a third site where I give them a server and allow them to use
their in-place PeeCees as thin clients.  The questions are, how much
machine do I need to run 20 clients?  What can I do with dual AMD XP
2600+ and 120GB serial ATA and 1 GB of ram?  2GB?

I've considered getting a small portable machine with a single
Ethernet card to take out to schools just to do a demo with their
in-place machines.  Would it make sense to walk in with a
pre-configured server and the universal boot disk?  (Given that I
could get a block of IPs, I guess).
Does the Universal boot disk really work (it didn't the one time I
tried to use it).

Ideas for getting into a school and showing things off as quickly as
possible are what I'm looking for.
-- 
Jay Pfaffman                           <pfaffman at utk.edu>
Asst Professor of Instructional Technology, U. TN, Knoxville
Experimenting with gmail, please honor the Reply-To