Lab computers need to be "frozen." We'll be switching our XP lab of about 30 computers over to something else this winter, and I'm making a couple of proposals, one of which is LTSP, and another is an immutable live-like system, updated monthly.
My third proposal for them is a more traditionally installed system, but with tmpfs laid over /home using unionfs. RAM for some of these older machines is 1GB, so it occurs to me that I might be able to force a swap or other disposable, on-disk partition over /home instead of RAM, but I'm unsure how to proceed with this and my Google-fu is failing me. There's a lot of information out there, and tmpfs will use swap when it runs out of RAM, but I don't want the machine to die of swap death. Instead, I'd rather have the changes to the user's $HOME be written to swap directly instead of stored in RAM and swapped out. The partition would, of course, need to be reset between reboots.
How is this kind of setup possible? TIA.
I looked into something similar a while back (didn't see you question until now)
If you're still trying to make this work, I have some notes here : http://users.telenet.be/mydotcom/howto/linuxkiosk/unionfs.htm