Edubuntu in a medium sized Public Library system

Jim Mann from the Greene county Public library in Ohio produced a series of videos on YouTube about creating Edubuntu Linux workstations (http://youtube.com/user/oldcomputermann ). He mostly goes over how to set the hardware up, but he brings up an interesting point I had not seen raised in the other Linux case studies- Edubuntu Linux can run a server/thin-client mode, where the server has a large hard disk, and the client boots directly from the server and accesses files from the server, and does not even have a local hard disk installed. I would expect this to work best in a learning lab type of environment where you could create a sub network fairly easily and have all the computers tied into a router that simply plugged into the server. You could certainly teach basic computer literacy classes on a Linux box as well as any other operating system, most people would want to know how to use the web browser and word processing programs, which would be the things you could show them just as well on the Edubuntu workstations. He also shows Linux running from what’s called a “live CD” which is simply Linux running directly from the CD without installing anything on the local hard drive. This is certainly a possibility but in practice the speed of running an operating system from an optical drive would not lead to a positive user experience. It would have the benefit of being unbreakable from the perspective of since there is no writing to the disk (the CD is mounted read only, things are only stored in memory on the computer) rebooting the computer would completely reset it and fix any issues caused by patron use.