This past year I have traveled to a lot of schools who have had their
budgets cut or .. who didnt have one to begin with, who needed to do
something with their systems.

I dont want to seem negative here but, when you start talking about 32mb
of ram, you (the school) need to stick with what is already working and
just add more ram. I have seen various Linux with GUI's run in 32mb but
- what for? If 98 is filling the need and its just slow, add some ram.
Updating to a modern OS of any sort means having some sort of base
requirements, and 32mb of ram .. well... thats crazy low.

I know you yourself have no control over this so please dont think Im
aiming this at you. I have seen schools still running Win95 and they
want to move to Vista or some linux variant. Can it be done? Probably.
Im not the one to do it as the time involved to stablize the OS and make
it work on a system like that ends up taking a lot of time.