Distributions/Configurations For Specific Uses?

Page writes "My college (UMPI) is currently reviewing a proposal to collect old hardware from small businesses and assemble machines for those who do not have a PC. The issue came up as to what linux distro to use that will allow us ease of both setup and ability to lock down the machine so once they are out in the field, they cant be tinkered with by accident (thus preventing problems later). These will be used solely for the purpose of web activities (surfing/mail), and word processing and *THATS IT*. Does anyone have suggestions and an idea about how to go about a standardized (or a sort of embedded) configuration across variable hardware?"

Comments

Client/Server

[qurob]

If it's possible, why not just set up terminals?

Whether a machine is a P166 or AMD 2000+ it'll be pretty much the same. Most colleges have networked dorms and such anyhow.

You might as well go with RedHat or your favorite distro, but when you're piecing computers together you can't do much about standards. Just hope for the best!

But what about printing?

[billmaly]

I'll guarantee you, once you get these machines out into the world, people will want to print with them. Printers fail and are changed, how will the plans for locked down systems affect the users ability to actually create something? Otherwise, I like the concept.

Re:But what about printing?

[afidel]

have generic queue's that arent specific to a piece of hardware? I know at least one university I attended did this with one queue per floor and then had one to four printers doing the work. This may not work well without something like a study lounge with a printer on each floor of a dorm if these are to go to students in the dorm though.

Anything should work.

[halftrack]

Any distro should work (choose Debian.) Most distro feature some form of automated installation.

PCI hardware is rarely a problem with newer kernels/distros, but if you're talking P100s and 486s with isa cards you may run into problems requiring custom setups (might be fun.)

Linux distros are by default (I'm going to regret saying this) locked down, but (I'm regretting) should be tweaked with boot passwords, firewalls (and updates.)

If possible running the machines as thin clients is a option to considere. (Although you would need to add a few strong servers which will add to your sofar 0$ budget.)

LTSP / K12LTSP

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with the previous posts about netbooting. Take a gool look at the LTSP / K12LTSP projects. The boot images that are assigned can be modified for specific machines based on MAC address, allowing you to configure lesser hardware to use the processing power of the server, and newer hardware to use its own processing power, with network storage of all ./home directories and apps. You can even use a modified version of DHCPd and an appropreate MacOS image to boot most Mac computers this way.

Word of warning, do not try and place the LTSP servers in a "server farm", spread them out over the network.

By having the computers as diskless workstations you can greatly simplify the long-term IT overhead of these systems, while at the same time accomplishing your goals.

For LTSP See:
k12ltsp.org
ltsp.org

For the modified DHCPd to do Mac NetBooting:
staff.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/~rlinewe aver/macnb/

QNX web demo and Yahoo mail services.

[teamhasnoi]

That would be fast as hell, secure (no hard drive) and (free, free and free). You can type all you want in the notepad on Yahoo.

Normal install + cleanup login script

[InodoroPereyra]

There were a couple similar requests in Slashdot recently, please do a search for more. The simplest idea I read at the time was the following. Do a basic install, configure a simple desktop for a typical user, save the corresponding "/home/user" somewhere as root so nobody can mess it up. Set the PC up only for one user. Then let people login, but make sure that when they log out the only home directory in the machine gets wiped out and the original setup is copied back from the place where it is backed up.

You will need to probably run a very lightweight desktop such as Xfce, if your hardware is very old. If you use Mandrake, you can play around choosing a minimal set of packages in the install, and then save the packages list on a floppy so that you only need to do the selection once. Installing in the rest of the machines will be much faster. Probably half an hour or so per machine if you do a light install.

Good luck, and thank you for choosing GNU/Linux :-)

Re:Not possible I'm afraid [Was Re:Client/Server]

[dan the person]

I think you a dreaming if you expect people to run OpenOffice and mozilla on old machines.

Mozilla is just bearable on my K6-200 with 96Mb of ram. OpenOffice just crawls.

As much as i hate to use MS products, on p100 class machines win95+IE5.5+Office95 really is considerably more usable than the linux alternatives.

Newer versions of MS Office might be OK too, i dunno i haven't used windows much for many years.

Re:Not possible I'm afraid [Was Re:Client/Server]

[AvitarX]

For word prossessing in Linux, Abiword is the way to go. It is super cool, and really small. I would also suggest using knoppix as a starting point. It has all the driver stuff fairly worked out, and it automounts CDs (probably floppies too). For the word prossessing you need to add either a standard print driver already setup, so they can print. Or preconfigure AbiWord to save as rtf by default. The rtf's it puts out are sufficient for esseys, btu I don't know how well it can format them for formal papers. You probably could get a deal on printers from the vendor though. I bet those cheapy, 50.00 dollor printers, at office max could be gotten for free for a good cause (they really like more people buying ink).
as far as internet, you really can't configure that on a CD, so you would nead a small hard drive and an easy internet configuration tool. I would imagine a clean GUI over wvdial would work great, and be easily chopped together with expect and any random /TK language.