Need help & advice with a Kiddie Internet kiosk.

[manowaraz]

Hello,
I have grown tired of repairing my niece's computer. The three of them just murder Winhose XP. They keep on getting slammed with viruses & malware due to popups.

So my idea is that I should install a Linux build that regenerates and clears every time they turn on the computer, sort of like a Kiosk mode. If I could have a separate user so I can run updates that would be perfect.

All I want them to have access to is Firefox with the plugins I give them such as Flash, etc. Basically more than anything they want to be able to go onto Disney, Nick Jr, and sites like that. I know how to limit Firefox itself with plugs Also there are quite a few great and simple linux games I know that they would love like that puzzle bobber type game. They are young enough that they do not need any Office type of programs, and if they did they could use Google's office online.
My thoughts to secure their browser experience would be to use Glubble and Ad Block Plus in Firefox.

Their computer is a bit of a dinosaur, it is a Pentium III 933mhz with 512 MB of ram, Diamond ST64 PCI video card, and a 15GB IDE hard drive, DVD drive. The motherboard is a VIA chipset with on-board audio. While it is old I think it should be fine for this application. It does run fine in WinXP for their purposes.

So what small distro should I try to work up for them, and how can I eliminate all of the menus stuff for them so that they only have shut down and switch user and the icons on the desktop to work with along with? Also, is there a way to have the computer do an automated disk check on bootup in case they shut the machine down the wrong way? I don't want to do the Live Disk route with them as they will scratch up the disk or be prone to playing with it.

Thanks in advance to the community!!
Tom

[coopstah13]

It depends how comfortable you are with linux already. Personally I could see doing this very easily on arch linux. Just install the stuff you want and nothing more. After you set it up for each user, what you could then do is make it so that the machine boots by default in a read only disk mode. Then, when you want to apply updates/change desktop icons/whatever, you can just reboot and change it to no longer be read only, make the changes and reboot.

This way while it is in normal operation, nothing can be written to disk so you wouldn't have to worry about things being installed, or changed or anything at all.

[manowaraz]

As for being comfortable around linux, it has always been fun for me to play with, and I have tried to help dev on an old distro called YES Linux, but I am in no way super familiar with it as a whole. Editing files, is cake work though using vi or pico from what I remember.

I was told to look into running puppy linux with some type of desktop manager by an old friend of mine, but I can not find him these days.

I am open to trying anything, and I love the challenge of the learning experience. I'll download Arch linux and give it a whirl with xVesa to try to keep it light.

As for making things read only, if that just changing the permissions of the partition where the distro is installed to 666? (Yeah it has been a while for me.)

I thank you again for your help, and for taking me seriously.
Tom

[coopstah13]

you should be able to edit the fstab file to specify the drives to be read only, I wouldn't muck around with filesystem permissions

[manowaraz]

Seems Arch didn't like this computer, I downloaded and burned it twice with ImageBurn, once at 4x and the other at 2x. Both times it kept on telling me data on the disk was corrupt. It passed the memory test fine, so no idea there....

[coopstah13]

Did you check md5sum?