What's the best thing to do?

Workstations are around 1.5ghz+ with 128 ram built-in video card. Windows and Linux both exist in the network.

I installed ubuntu in each Linux Workstation, and it's kinda' slow in older machines. Another thing, I could'nt remember if I did or the automatic partition assigned some space for swap. So I'm looking for another solution. Before I do something, I want some advice. I could:

(1) reinstall everything. kubuntu-server then install kde + apps. kde because of the kiosk tool.

(2) I read something about Ltsp but I think I can only pump a pc with 512ram in 2.3 ghz and there's about 20 workstation.

application: firefox, gaim, open office, x chat will do.

side question:
If I set up a dhcp server, would it "disturb/destroy" the network with static IPs? The dhcp server will not be the gateway.

Would it make a difference if I have a 2GB swap? or 3, 4?


Thank you very much

'hope to hear from you guys soon ^_^

For performance you really don't want to rely on swap since its disk based (i.e incredibly slow compared to RAM). You still need it because it comes into play for "paging" and "virtual memory" allocations but if you're doing lots of page ins compared to page outs then you're memory constrained so your best bet is to add RAM.

Anyway rule of thumb I've always followed for swap is 2 x memory - so if you have 512 MB RAM you should have 1 GB of swap. For the reasons noted above adding more doesn't really help.

As to DHCP if your question is will having a DHCP server affect the PCs for which you've configured static IPs the answer is no. If they are setup to use a specific IP they will use that whether you have a DHCP server or not. At my job we have almost all user workstations on DHCP but all of our servers have static IPs.

The caveat to above is you have to make sure you do NOT add your static IPs to your DHCP pool as you could then end up with two different PCs with the same IP (one you had assigned statically and another that got a reservation from the DHCP server). In my organization we have the DHCP pool in a completely different subnet.

try the command
at the root prompt
it should display all partiutions and their types