Brian and I have been researching possible Ubuntu server specifications. We found a few interesting links, http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/linux_terminal_server?page=0%2C0, http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/ServerSizing. Using these links we determine for 10 clients we would need at least a 1GHz processor. One modern processor (like a Pentium 4) would work fine, or perhaps two Pentium 3s to compensate for their lower bus speed. 1GB of RAM would be sufficent, but slightly more would be safer. For hard drive space, we allocate 20GB which will be more than enough for the operating system and packages, 5GB as swap, and if we would give 500 users 50MB, that would be another 25GB. Therefore, 50GB should be enough. We could be on the safe side and also implement a RAID array.
