running applications off a server

[Phyo W. Soe]

Good day to you all.

I have some questions regarding running applications off a server. The 
setup is like this. There is a server in a classroom environment. In 
that classroom, there are PCs for students and each PC has Ubuntu 
installed. Student PCs are not powerful ones. We would like to run some 
educational applications off the server rather than installing those 
applications on each student PC. For some other applications like 
listening to music and surfing the web, a student PC processes them 
locally. I want to know if that is possible. I have worked with XDMCP 
and LTSP but those are not what I want. Both of them rely entirely on a 
server for processing and storage.

Another question is if we run some applications off a server, we would 
like to have storage space on the server for each student where they can 
store their personal files, assignments to be marked, etc., For example, 
under /home of server, each student will have a folder with their 
student number and a quota of 1GB. For this, is SAMBA the solution?

Many thanks.

Phyo