MacOS 9 configuration suggestions?

[Derrik Pates]

I know this sounds a little offtopic, but really, it's not. I've got a
Powermac 7500/100 with a NewerTech MaxPowr CPU upgrade, making it a dual
604e/180. It runs Linux, and runs quite well and stable. And now,
there's actually a need for me to take this old beast in to work, so
that our web developers can do testing against browsers in MacOS 9.

So, what I want to do is have one moderately-large disk image file that
will contain just apps and the system software, and act as the boot
volume, which will be read-only, and have each user's home directory have a
smaller (50 MB or so?) disk image containing their prefs, cache, and any
other data files. I can get MacOS configured fine, but trying to get the
setup I am thinking of for prefs and data files is where I'm stuck.

I have 160 MB of RAM for the machine, and we probably won't have more than
one or two users at a time running MacOS sessions, so I figure as long
as I make sure I have some extra swap laying around, and the sessions
are limited to 64 MB so (maybe 80, or 96, though that might be pushing
it), users should be able to use ssh into the box, and 'startmol' their
way into a MacOS session pretty simply.

Any suggestions are appreciated. Also, if anyone knows of a good,
preferably freely available X server for Windows (98, 2000, XP), let me
know. (No, I'm no big Windows fan, but some of my coworkers use it
religiously.)

Thanks,

-- 
Derrik Pates
dpates@dsdk12.net
dpates@voxel.net