This penguin walks on a bed of blue screens of death!

[Ron Wickersham]

take a look at http://www.qvwm.org/

that's the wm they used at ltsp at Linuxworld. (Linux Terminal Server Project
http://www.ltsp.org)   i think you'd like the X-term approach better than
diskless box you're using (for swap and other reasons as you've noted)...
i've got a boot rom and would be happy to discuss further with you if you
need more help.  your hardware is totally adequate for X-terms.

-ron

---snip---

> That is, it works pretty well for me, because I know what I'm doing.  I 
> couldn't run GNOME or KDE on any of the workstations because they only have 
> 64MB of memory (aack!) and it is impossible to set up any sort of swap 
> device when netbooting.  By default, it now runs FVWM2 when users log in, 
> and the default configuration (at least it's the default in RedHat 7.1) will 
> probably get a big "Huh?" from everyone who looks at it.  It took me 30 
> seconds to figure out that I was supposed to click on the desktop to get any 
> kind of a Start menu (there was nothing at all like a "Start" button), so it 
> would probably take most people 30 minutes to figure it out.  I couldn't 
> find any session manager that was any frendlier and that didn't overload 
> that precious little 64MB of memory.  It's weird, though, because I remember 
> that in RedHat 6.1, FVWM had a "start" button.
> 
> Even worse, the "Programs" section of the menu is empty!  I can't see any 
> way that anyone besides myself would feel comfortable starting programs 
> using an XTerm!  I guess I'm somewhat spoiled because Ximian GNOME runs on 
> my home computer (it has 256MB of memory), so I have no experience with 
> setting up FVWM2 or any other session manager besides KDE.  Can anyone clue 
> me in on how configure it?