Well, like I said, really you are trading off ease of initial setup against ease of maintanance. Personally I see no need to blow eproms - just boot of a floppy if you want diskless workstations (ok - diskless apart from the floppy :-). Is this a problem in the classroom ?
You underestimate how distructive children can be :) The few things which kids can stick forign objects in the better!
A small local harddisk is always useful for swap anyway.
Even if you can work out a way to do swap over NFS you probably don't want to do it anway.
The easiest to setup is a local installation on each client - enough to run X. This is also probably the easiest if you have quite a diversity of different hardware - as each PC may need a different X server, etc.
Though Linux handles diverse hardware with rather less fuss than Windows.
The LUG talk contains some very simple instructions (in conjunction with the XDM/X Terminal howto) on configuring 2 existing machines to share X desktops using XDM - if you have 2 machines - I would start from there.
The sort of thing which could work well would be "Sharedware" type hardware. However AFAIK they are still supporting Windows exclusivly. -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763