how can I create parent/child accounts in lightweight distro?

[habilis]

I want to make some computer systems for kids 10 and under. I have some old systems that won't run Qimo (which is modified Xubuntu). They are 233 MHz K6-2 machines, and 200Mhz Pentium Pro's, etc.

I'd like to install a light distro on them like Damn Small Linux, or Puppy. Then I want to setup up a parent (administrator) account, and child account(s). The child account only needs permissions for the few programs I will install. I have Gcompris and Tuxpaint in mind so far. I want to restrict access to everything else because the parents aren't familiar with Linux, and I won't be available to fix the system if the child starts pointing and click on random things in the menus.

I'm looking for recomendations of distros, programs, but most of all how to easily accomplish the accounts/permissions.

[GNU-Fan]

DSL has Fluxbox, and Fluxbox can be changed to "kiosk mode".
Linux Kiosk PC : a Fluxbox Custom Desktop

This is what I would do.

[habilis]

Thanks for the suggestion GNU-Fan. I checked out the link and its over my head.

[reed9]

You can create a user, and limit their ability to read or execute anything you don't want them to have access to with a combination of setting file permissions and using sudo.

How Linux file permissions work

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Sudoers

[habilis]

Is there a way to streamline the process, as opposed to setting the permissions on every file and/or directory?

[reed9]

Use the -R flag to recursively change everything in a directory.

chmod -R 700 /home/bob

This give full access to the owner and no access to any group or other user to the directory /home/bob.

You can combine it with say the find command as well to locate files and change permissions. This is beyond anything I've used it for, but to steal an example from Wikipedia

find path/ -type d -exec chmod a-x {} \;

This, to quote, "removes execute permission for all directories (cannot list files) in tree starting from path/ (use '-type f' to match files only)."