if you serious about putting linux on some of the boxes, you might want to consider doing diskless workstations. so instead of storing the os locally and risking customers messing it up, each time you turn the computer on, it would download the os off the server and boot that. that way anytime any of the boxes gets messed up, a simple reboot is all you need to fix it. i'm not a linux guy, but i would assume linux supports it, if not, i know freebsd does