tlug: Linux on the university Win LAN

[Tony Laszlo <laszlo@example.com>]

For the last few years, I have been teaching 
some part-time courses at a university. 
This year, from the second half of the year,
I'll be teaching several classes but all on 
one day of the week. 
The classroom has about 60 Fujitsu computers 
(probably about 5-6 years old) which all 
run Windows 95. I suppose they are connected 
with an NT LAN. They take a very long 5 
minutes or so to boot up, as the computer 
first goes through some kind of scanning 
process and then asks for the user to login. 
Students are not able to store any data on 
the hard drive of the computer. 
Each computer has a name and requires a 
password. I forget what's required, but 
somehow the user has to input the day and 
period into the thing as s/he logs in. 
Applications usable during that period 
are made available by the system. While 
data can be written to the hard disk, it 
gets zapped after the computer reboots. 

Running Netscape on these computers is 
rather painful. When they are not crashing 
they are responding _very_ slowly. 
I suspect that a lot of the speed problem 
comes from a low amount of memory in the machine 
and subsequent swapping to the hard disk. 

Anyway, I'm wondering if it might be possible 
get a more stable situation going by sticking 
in a floppy and getting Linux running. 

My questions: 

Assuming no cooperation on the part of the 
university (other than information regarding 
the IP addresses of the machines) 

* will I be able to get Linux running from a 
floppy and utilizing the NT LAN properly (will 
I be able to get Lynx to function, for example)?

* is running X and Netscape out of the question? 



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