There are approximately 200 workstations around campus for student use of which approximately 35 are Pentium 4 powered. The rest are either P3 or P2 machines with around 256MB RAM.

The simple fact of the matter is that with machines like these there are few options when it comes to Operating Systems. I'm sad to say that the best option as far as performance is Windows 2000 (as long as I don't install any updates on it ever and just run Firefox).

Of course Win2k is the worst option as far as stability, viruses, and ease of upkeep, especially when compared to a Linux LTSP setup. Ubuntu doesn't run that smoothly on these machines though, I've heard that 512MB is the minimum realistic requirement as far as RAM and that's just more than we have available for these workstations.

Xubuntu though seems to work pretty well

Also: Thoughts on Linux/Ubuntu