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I've done something like this. I ended up using a CD-R removing the hard drives. The advantage of a CD-R is that it can't be modified easily which removed 99% of the possible ways to mess with the system. (I wouldn't be as confident a USB drive couldn't be modified.) It also makes it easy to test upgrades and deploy them rapidly.

I know it would be possible to do network booting but I've tried it and it was slower and took more effort. For my purposes, I found slax easy to set up, modify and use. I tried out several other distros and justbrowsing seemed better to me. However, after testing it out on regular users, the slax install seemed easier to use and harder to mess up. I think it's because having several options confuses people. (I think that explains Apple's success. As much as I may prefer choice and don't mind learning something new, the average user doesn't want to "have to" make choices.)

If I'd had to expose it to the general public, I would have probably used a little superglue to ensure the CD didn't get pulled out, or just stuck the CD-ROM drive inside behind a cover. Yes a deviant with a pocketknife might still manage to pry open the drive or a geek with a screwdriver might replace something internal or reset the BIOS modification password but I still think it would work better than most kiosk systems I've worked with. It was simple enough that kids and old people almost never complained. (I say "almost" because we didn't connect our kiosk machines to printers. I was aiming for low maintenance and printers are pretty much never low maintenance.)

The one real irritant is that people sometimes wandered onto sites that were "Internet Explorer Only." While I possibly could have overcome some of that with IE emulation in Firefox, I choose instead to just say it was bad site design and that, for security reasons, we wouldn't be providing a kiosk with Internet Explorer. Ever.

If I'd been willing to invest more time, I probably would have built a custom distro with Suse studio. If anybody goes that route, I'd be interested in the results.

Okay, I gotta say that's pretty impressive. Not that Linux will run a PlayStation 4, but that they could do what it takes to get it installed and running.

In a similar vein, I was on the Microsoft campus the other day. One of the instant bean-to-cup coffee machines wouldn't work, it was basically frozen solid with a non-responsive touchscreen. I unplugged it and plugged it back in. (I'm not kidding, that's what MS support would have suggested, right?)

Lo and behold, when it booted up I saw it was running Slax, a Linux variant often found in embedded systems.

I laughed- if only the MS employees knew that this subversive OS was the one making them their morning coffee (the lifeblood of every corporation) they'd probably be up in arms about it. lol

I dunno if you're using "Slax" as an abbreviation for slackware, or you're talking about the slackware-derived distro of that name. If the former (as I expect), be aware of the latter, and maybe avoid that abbreviation in the future to avoid confusion. If the latter, there's still slackware itself, and the majority of distros based on it are not Slax derivatives (in fact, there's slightly more Slackware->SuSE->x than Slackware->Slax->x).

Then there's Gentoo, Arch, and some less popular ones, which are independent of the big three. They're also *singularly* bad choices for saying Use Distro X, as anyone with the skills to succeed with them (a) already knows about them and (b) can also succeed with whatever distro they use work, but they do exist.

Anyway, I disagree with your suggestion GP is actually saying Use Distro X, he's responding to your claim that "Canonical infested the ecosystem" by completely misunderstanding you as "Canonical infested Ubuntu", and suggesting Ubuntu's not the only game in town (which of course you knew -- do these fools really think they're the only one who's heard of non-Ubuntu systems?!). Where (to me) it's clear you mean that every distro attempting to be user-friendly is taking cues from Ubuntu, thus deteriorating in the same way. So it's just pitifully bad reading skills (which, you gotta admit, is a time-honored tradition on /.), not trotting out the tired claim* that "my distro" will fix everything.

Don't ask me which is worse... ;)

*Note: I will rarely (twice to date) tell someone Use Distro X -- where X = "Arch, or slackware, but I recommend Arch". I've only done this for people who I know have the requisite skills (as proved by their success bending SuSE and Ubuntu, respectively, to their wills), but they don't realize they've learned that much, and are still holding to a "user-friendly" distro even though it's now just getting in their way.

Hi, Try Slax, 190Mb and comes in a tar arch or iso, easy to install, has a recent kernel and xorg,

You can make larger if you want, good documentation as well.

Links...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAX
http://www.slax.org/documentation.php
http://www.slax.org/get_slax.php

Regards GlennsPref

Hi, Try Slax, 190Mb and comes in a tar arch or iso, easy to install, has a recent kernel and xorg,

You can make larger if you want, good documentation as well.

Links...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAX
http://www.slax.org/documentation.php
http://www.slax.org/get_slax.php

Regards GlennsPref

http://www.slax.org/get_slax.php ? although slightly outdated at times, quite minimalistic.

also i have scripts to create hackish single-cd version of slackware install, although since version 11 or 12 it doesn't fit with x and kde on a single cd anymore, only the "server version" does :)

It has existed! Slax has had an online customized ISO builder for a few months now.

Add optical drive,(and vid card and sound obviously) then use a live cd or dvd OS and set of apps, the latest Knoppix or whatever, run the whole shebang from RAM

I don't know what your opinion on slackware is, but if you really want to make a custom live cd, you may want to check out slax.

Knoppix is nice because it has many more people behind it and thus has much broader driver support. But, to fit it on the media (and optimize as well), they use tricks on the iso. This isn't necessarily bad, it's just done for a targeted purpose.

On the other hand slax has a rootcopy directory that makes it easy. This was information I picked up about a year ago when I was looking into it, so things may have changed since then.

Add optical drive,(and vid card and sound obviously) then use a live cd or dvd OS and set of apps, the latest Knoppix or whatever, run the whole shebang from RAM

I don't know what your opinion on slackware is, but if you really want to make a custom live cd, you may want to check out slax.

Knoppix is nice because it has many more people behind it and thus has much broader driver support. But, to fit it on the media (and optimize as well), they use tricks on the iso. This isn't necessarily bad, it's just done for a targeted purpose.

On the other hand slax has a rootcopy directory that makes it easy. This was information I picked up about a year ago when I was looking into it, so things may have changed since then.

Perhaps they need a console font? I think the VGA console needs it in either a raw bitmap or psf format.

For paranoia, I would think they should look to OpenBSD. They are the origins of many secure features in open source software: OpenSSH, OpenSSL, and so on. They just need people who can maintain it for them. After all, *nix style systems are really designed to have administrators maintain the system, while the users use it instead of trying to do the maintenance themselves.

If Linux is the choice, I have concerns about both Red Hat and Debian. They both seem to like using either experimental versions (gcc 2.96), maintainers try to "fix bugs" (OpenSSL weak keys), or use weird or unstable patches. I have been wanting to try Slackware as a base (as far as I can tell they don't dick with core projects), with the ability to install Debian apps using apt-get.

The best I've been able to do is just download Slackware packages from Slacky.eu and Slackware's Alien and manually converted Debian packages, and installing them manually. I think slacky has a few apt-get like utilities, but I don't use them...

Then again, since this is probably for a massive group of people, they should create a Linux distro for the Dalai Lama. Just take packages from Slackware (for the core) and rpms/Debian for the end user apps which aren't in slackware--alien will convert these formats and slackware comes with an rpm2tgz utility, compile a custom kernel (maybe with some security patches which work and you are certain are stable), create any custom packages you may need (such as a Tibetan font) and make your iso image.

Unless you think they will have limited hard drive space or need to only install specific packages, just have it install everything for the basic or default option. Or perhaps it should just be a live CD which stores /home on the hard drive--this would probably be more secure as no one can modify your system software on the disc. Perhaps you could even use Slax as a base. They seem to have an easy drop-in live packaging system. It will be work to get it right, but I think it will be worth it.

They will need to find someone who can do this though, but it will be easy for someone who is a decent programmer and knows the *nix command line. Debian packages are just tarballs inside .ar archives. Slackware packages are just strait tarballs. The mkisofs man page talks about the switches to make a bootable image (look for "El Torito"). There also appear to be tutorials how to make bootable CDs.

Either Damn Small Linux or Slax is what you want - easily customizable, easy to use, good browser experience, runs from either a CD or a USB Flash Drive, minimal machine requirements, can be loaded completely into memory for speed. And if somehow, somebody crashes it - just turn the machine off and on again and you're back in business...

Also, should you need bookmarks that can be easily added to, just use one of the online bookmark services - no need to worry about saving bookmarks on the local machine.

How'd you want to create the "perfect" AV product?

Put the system on a ROM chip. For now Slax works pretty good. Goes real fast when I load it into RAM. Very nice and very safe.

http://www.slax.org/

Are there any alternative that'll spit out custom ISOs which our non-technical staff can use to install a complete Linux system?

Take a look at Knoppix Remastering.

In a former life, I used to build custom embedded Linux distros as the base platform for other company projects; Knoppix makes it so easy, if I hadn't already moved on from that job, it would have sent me to the unemployment line.

Actually, I exagerate a tad there - Knoppix makes it almost trivial to get a customized Debian-based system down to the 40-50MB range; On my most challenging project, I managed to get a stable system running custom builds of X and Mozilla to fit on a 16MB flash disk. But presuming you don't have quite such minimalistic hardware requirements, Knoppix makes the task a breeze. Just unpack it, chroot into it, "apt-get remove" whatever you don't want and build whatever else you do, and roll it back into a cloop'd iso. C'est fini.



For comparison, I usually prefer to run Slackware as my normal Linux distro, and looked into Slax before Knoppix. For some tasks you might find it easier to work with, as it uses a more modular approach, but I found that far more limiting and inconvenient if you want to make fine-grained tweaks or even just alter configuration details without swapping out whole packages.

I am not sure that I would call knoppix a lite distro. SLAX really is lite, and it has a subproject devoted to USB stick installs, although AFAIK nobody sells it like that.

It also has a bunch of tools devoted to security, but IMHO reinstalling XP from your system restore disks is easier and usually faster and more reliable than trying to "clean" a compromised PC.

Take care,
-mat

$ slax copy2ram

It puts the entire O/S in RAM and moves as fast as any installed O/S I've ever seen. The CD is ejected during boot time. If only one optical drive exists you're free to use it to make backups.

But still, the $100 laptop isn't out yet, and won't be priced at $100 for years. For now, maybe schools could hand out USB sticks with, say, SLAX (bonus: modular = easily expandable, without having to re-burn a whole CD) on them, maybe along with FireFox 2 (nobody would care if they used IceWeasel instead), GAIM 2 beta, amaroK 1.4.5, etc... I could help. My school's IT staff will listen to me. I tried getting them to switch to the GIMP (unsuccessfully), maybe I could bounce that idea off them. SLAX has a future. Not that other USB-based distros (i.e. MCNLive) don't...

Were I to build a CF-based Linux system (I've been thinking of doing just that), I'd do it much like SLAX, i.e. treating the flash almost as a read-only device. The operating system and preinstalled software would be on a separate flash device, user data on another (to avoid OS being blown away if user data device dies, plus the OS flash could be read-only). Also, all changes would be made to memory and only committed at specific times (at a set interval, on user request, or on shutdown).

I just carry around disc#1 of the current Slackware set, which I use to boot from.

SLAX

Slax based Education Live CD, EDU-Nix

Isn't it easier to take the internet with you? : http://www.slax.org/webconfig.php

You already can install on os on you flash drive. SLAX would definitely be my favorite, since it has KDE, rather than one of the "light" window managers in Puppy, DSL, and the other small live distros use. I even found some directions so you can leave it as Fat.

You can have SLAX load to ram if you have about 512mb available. As for writing files, I believe that all writes are writen to RAM and when you shut down you are given the option of making writes permanent.

Funny how I shrugged at the rash of thumbdrives out there, that is, until recently. They keep getting cheaper and cheaper and I kept buying them. I have since, stopped, however, it was only after the 12 step program.

Now, what do I keep on mine? Slax - Kill Bill, of course it really has brought me the level of standardization that I need from one computer to the next and it can do all (like many other small distros) the things that I need. I would however recommend something like Truecrypt for ensuring the security of your information. I would also recommend that you back your drive up on a regular basis, these things can be a bit unforgiving.

I could go on and on about the various apps, it really all depends on what you are doing. I do find the following though, very useful: Wireshark (Ethereal), Open Office and the usual suspects, samba, Etherwake, NVU, Thunderbird, rdesktop, various vnc flavors and other well known management utilities.

If I did not emphasize enough earlier, if you are going to rely on these little gems, I think you should always have an identical spare, and additionally, perform a backup on a regular basis. You might want to get creative and build a library of tools which could be easily accessed remotely to keep your drive lean. I would also highly recommend encrypting data you wouldn't want public.

Or, another approach would be to just carry an iso for any live distro on the USB drive... You don't even have to "install" a VM per se. Instead, just create a VM, configure it to boot off the CD-ROM, and attach an ISO to the CD-ROM, power on the VM, voila you have yourself a live instance of an OS. This is what I have done:

*) Installed VMware Server 1.0 on my SuSE box
*) Created a VM with a minimum disk space (100MB) allocation
*) Carry a Slax ISO http://www.slax.org/ on a USB drive
*) Mount the USB drive
*) Attach the Slax ISO to the VM (VM/Edit Settings/Use ISO image)
*) Power on - boot slax using the following parameters "slax autoexec=startx copy2ram"
*) unmount the USB drive - Voila, you now have yourself a truly virtual instance of a LIVE OS - all in less than 10 mins (YMMV)

I'm currently playing around setting up virtual desktops, the next logical extension of the virtualized enterprise,using this approach. I wonder what http://www.moka5.com/ has been up to though ...

For anybody who hasn't used Slax, they give you an option to upload personal data (passworded, of course), making it a very good live CD in that you can travel anywhere and are still able to access your personal data provided there is an internet connection. Perhaps an Internet OS could take a route similar to this?

The 200~ish distro of choice should be SLAX http://www.slax.org/, fast and small, based on Slackware. Just add/remove modules as you desire. Create your own modules if you can't find what you need.

For those wanting a easily customizable distro that will fit on a mini-cd with only a 192MB ISO, there is SLAX with KDE 3.5, the KDE Office suite, MPlayer, etc. There is even a 112MB version with XFCE instead of KDE. Based on Slackware

http://slax.org/

There is a good example what can be done within 192 mb what is the smallest practical size - the size of small CD. And the example: http://slax.org/ it is a microlinux with KDE and lot's of useful stuff, also modificable with some 800 packages ready to add.

http://slax.org/

My Memorex 1Gb thumbdrive boots Slax, has OpenOffice 2.0, Firefox 1.5, and an assload of other software. And most of these were straight conversions of Slackware packages. FF1.5 was a direct conversion from the original MoFo .tgz, not even a Slackware specific package.

There is a livecd called slax http://www.slax.org/ that has an option at bootup to copy itself to ram and eject the cd, but because its designed to run on a mini cd (180 mb i think) it doesn't need too much ram.

I currently use a hacked/customized version of Slax see Slax. I carry it on a 1GB USB Drive that includes customized versions of Firefox, Thuderbird and Samba plus many more modules. So far this setup has been truly convenient for me. On occasions when I find myself without a laptop but near a PC that is able to boot USB drives (I have yet to come across a PC that did not), all I do is stick the drive in the USB port, boot up in trimmed down KDE environment, use FireFox to check Yahoo/Gmail/Hotmail accounts, and Thunderbird to poll my personal domain accounts. Once done, reboot, voila, no cookies etc. left behind. No need for someone to log-on to their pre-installed OS accounts, nor to suffer the embarrassment of accidental viewing of history list of pr0n sites that the person had surfed last .... :D

As other people are constantly pointing out whenever somebody posts an idea like this, "non-volatile" memory like MemorySticks and CompactFlash has a limited lifespan.

Correct, and that is the main limitation of such devices. Just off the top of my head here, I can come up with an idea that just might work, but the OP had better be damn well prepared to use a very lightweight distro.

Step 1: Partition that USB drive. You're going to need a very small / partition, and a much larger /usr partition. These are not to be messed with. You'll also need a /home-flash partition large enough for your personal use, and of course, a backup plan for when that drive fails.
Step 2: Build your kernel. This can be tricky. Building a kernel that accesses the USB drive can't be that difficult, but you'll also need initrd support. Why? Well, because you've got 128 MB of RAM, and you certainly don't want to write to that flash drive all the time. Make a small, perhaps 32 MB initrd and mount it at /var. You can modify your init scripts to populate this directory safely. Symlink /tmp to /var/tmp, and now you've cut down a lot of your writes to your flash device.
Step 3: Make yourself another 32MB initrd and mount it a /home. Again, your init scripts can safely populate this with all your dot-files. Anything you definately want to save must be manually copied to the /home-flash partition. Optionally you can take a look at the scripts included with Slax. One script (IIRC configsave) will make a tar.gz of all those pertinant files and save them to a partition on a USB flash drive.

It should be noted that I don't know if the linux kernel can make and support multiple RAM drives at once. If not, just make one RAM drive, mount it a /var, and make /home a symlink to /var/home.

I'd suggest downloading the latest Slax Live-Cd and see for yourself! Includes kde 3.2 beta2. Fast and very slick looking too!

I haven't looked at slapt-get yet, but swaret is great, and the dropline installer gives you the most kickass Gnome desktop available. (Although, at the moment I'm experimenting with a combination of the development version of Fluxbox and the ROX file manager.)

I also recommend giving the Slackware Live CD a go. Hmm, it appears to have been renamed SLAX. It's my rescue/utility CD of choice, primarily because it fits on a mini (185MB) CD-R. It's a nice balance somewhere between tomsrtbt and Knoppix

Go Slackware!