As someone that works as a network manager in a secondary school in Norwich I can say that the IT support brach for the schools has a hard enough time with windoze.

There have been alot of success stories with using the Linux Terminal Server project (www.ltsp.org) and the K12-LTSP distribution (www.k12ltsp.org) in schools and colleges. This basically uses any PC as the client that the students use, which boots over the network and all applications run on a pretty decent spec server. Education programs that still run under Windows can run under emulations like vmware, win4lin, wine, etc. Now that there is a excellent "office suite" in OpenOffice.org there hardly seems a reason not to consider it.

I can't see why these can't be deployed in our schools, it would certainly cut down on the maintenance of client machines, leaving more time to educate the users. And can increase the use of PCs donated from local companies (once Windoze is properly removed) as the clients hardly need powerful processor or graphics cards. Any money saved on Windows licences can be put into buying one or more well-specified application servers to cover the whole school.

Cheers.

David.