Actually I've just had a thought - if there are any schools out there who have large amounts of 386/486 PCs ...
Actual many companies basically 'throw out' any PC that is more than (say) 5 or 6 years old. As long as they can completely disown the PCs (ie will not be liable if the thing blows up and kills someone) then they may just give them away to a good cause ... My company did this, and I was able to obtain a few PCs for basically nothing. We used them as the basis for playing around with Linux clustering within the users group. The problem is obtaining monitors (which I obviously don't need for clustering).
they could quite easily be configured in the same way to produce cheap graphical terminals running from a central server.
I have fiddled with this sort of thing in the past, and the problem is that while it can be done, X is still quite slow. I would be interested to know how X runs when the actual applications are on another machine though ... I would say don't bother with 386, but concentrate on the 486s, and try to use accelerated cards where possible. It would probably be worth trying to salvage lots of machines, and try to get a few decent machines from the lot, with (say) 16 Mb RAM each ? (You need network cards too of course) In theory it should be possible to set up a complete internet lab using this sort of idea, as long as you have a server that has sufficient power to run several copies of netscape on behalf of the clients :-) I would be particularly interested in anyone that has managed to set up a 'lab' using this sort of idea ... Just my thoughts. Kevin. (Northants Linux Users Group)