Multi-Head Linux Systems (Score 1)

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!