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Setting Up Mac OS X for a Teenage Coffeehouse?
WCityMike writes "I plan to donate a grape iMac to a local church-run non-profit coffeehouse for teenagers, and would like to give it to them appropriately set up for the atmosphere it'll be in. I'm seeking advice on a number of fronts - what freeware or shareware applications would be good for such an environment? Should visitors be allowed to have their own accounts (presumably created by the administrator), or should I just set up one 'student' account and one 'administrator' account? If the latter, is there a way to prevent students from saving things on the hard drive (thus forcing them to use a diskette and/or the CD drive?), and/or a 'Simple Finder' interface extant for OS X? Is there existing software that makes this easier or more configurable, or is it all inside the OS? I'm fairly familiar with Mac OS X, but have never needed to run anything outside a single-user environment."
Image it first, because no matter what you do, someone will somehow find a way to trash it or release a virus or the hard drive will crash or lightning will strike it or....
Agile Artisans
what freeware or shareware applications would be good for such an environment?
Yellow Dog Linux ?
/me ducks
I would then train someone within the organization on how to setup, modify, and maintain the accounts (unless that is going to be you.).
That's key--I would make it a condition of the donation, unless you want to spend a lot more time re-jiggering that computer later. I can guarantee that even if they know what they want to do with it now, they'll come up with something different/additional within a month.
Better off teaching them to fish.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
No matter what platform you are using, I'd suggest that you create just one account for the end-users. As always, keep it simple.
-- Reality checks don't bounce.
The poster has an iMac. S/he wants to give it away. Why be mean and quibble about OSes? Windows, Mac, Linux, have their different merits in different environments but if it's free (as in beer) then no-one need gripe.
You're clearly out of your mind. Windows? Teens? "Safe from Viruses".
... no amount of Update Zone Alarm, New Updates or Anti Virus checking is going to prevent those teenagers from screwing the system.
...
Bwwwwaaaaahahahahahhahahahahahah!
Okay, sorry. OSX is a much, much, much safer environment for teens to be thrown loose into, than Windows.
I'm not even going to bother with the whole "Virus" thing
Out of the box, you can set up an OSX account that deletes itself at the end of each session and renews the home dir every time, through the OS, safely. Check macosxhints.com for details on how to do this
OSX is -designed- for people like this, in scenario's like this.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I currently admin about 25 public Macs running OS X. What we currently do have two accounts- one guest and one admin. A clean copy of the guest account is kept compressed (tar) on the hard drive. At startup, the old guest home folder is removed and replaced the with backup that has nothing extra there. This saves lots of headaches since problems can usually be fixed with a restart. Couple that with some creative permissions and SetFile (found in developer tools) to make unnecessary things invisible and you have a secure workstation that can be put back to like-new condition with only a reboot.
I work for a web dev company and we need to test Safari and IE Mac compatibility, so I bought an old iMac from a friend of mine for this purpose. I created an Admin account and a general user shared account.
You specify which applications they are allowed to run through System Preferences, as well as prevent them from changing passwords, burning DVDs/CDs, etc. If you have any kind of proficiency with UNIX, you can prevent them from writing to anything on the hard drive by setting the permissions through the terminal. There might be a tool to do this already, but I just use the terminal for what I need.
First of all, best of luck with this! I think it's a great idea. (Among other things, teens are already hanging out at several coffee houses in my area, and since they are commercial/for-profit establishments, it's a pretty expensive pastime for them. A non-profit version geared just for them might help them socialize without loads of cash getting pried from their fingers at the same time.)
But back to the Mac, have you considered the possibility of just using MacOS 9.1 on the grape iMac instead of OS X? I know this might seem foolish, but I bring it up for a couple reasons.
1. There's an excellent program for locking down a MacOS 9.1 (or earlier) desktop environment, called FoolProof. It's usually used in educational settings, but it's a very flexible way to prevent people from saving files to specific devices, deleting or rearranging icons on the desktop, and so on. (And yes, it even prevents people from trying to bypass it by booting without extensions enabled.) FoolProof is commercial software, but there's a good chance someone might have a copy they're no longer using that they could donate to the cause.
2. MacOS 9.1 would run much faster on an older iMac than OS X does, so it might give a better user experience in that respect.
3. You won't have a great choice of web browsers under MacOS 9.x - but at least you have Internet Explorer 5 for the Mac which was fairly recently patched to fix security issues/bugs, and feels familiar to most users. You also have the iCab browser which could be thrown on there as an alternate.
Macs are great for people who can use them but when you take the general public (idiots in general hence why we have so many virus problems) and start to mix MS things become messy.
Just a few points:
These are teens we are talking about, not senior citizens. They'll figure it out.
Virus problems solved by Windows??
Windows easier to use than Mac?
What kind of stuff do you think they need to do that will be so confusing on a Mac? A web browser and a word processor would be sufficient and those can only vary so much.
Some friends of mine set something like this up for a local ministry useing Linux. Everything is locked down and the internet is filtered. There are always a good number of people using the machines doing homework and webmail. It works pretty well.
Why have 1 person driving a backhoe when you could employ 20 with shovels?
Please, please, please keep your religion out of our streets, office buildings, schools and government. These are common spaces which we'll have to share with you even if we don't share your religion.
This is way OT (go, go gadget karma!), but couldn't the same thing be said about politics, or any strongly-held belief?
Is it at all reasonable to expect that what people believe will not affect what they do in the public sphere?
If I had mod points I'd have used them negatively on your post instead of posting. Part of learning any operating system, or anything, is spending time it, poking around, and doing things you didn't know how to do. Another large part is asking questions from people who have the know-how, just like the OP did. Instead of sharing knowledge, which you presumably have, you decided to deconstruct his or her post.
I can't think of a better way to learn than learning while helping charity. If the OP was doing this for money, or for a multi-million dollar company you'd be right. But since this is a library, isn't it well within the very spirit of public libraries to learn? Really, you ought to be asking yourself why you're not learning to do something for charity that you didn't know how to do.
Setup your user (admin user) and a regular user. Allow them to save to the hard disk with a caveat....no files exist longer then one day. Write a script to clean out everything and restore things like standard Safari settings and the like (run Reset Safari to clean it up..not sure if this is scriptable). Put the script in the Admin User's crontab or root's crontab. For user saving files to disk, use a USB hub and have them use USB Drives for saving their items. Failing that, they could use CD-RW's.
Gorkman
Grades 4-9 is a young ADULT? Are you kidding me? Young Adults are 18-24 (or there abouts).
They are children. Damn PC schools.
80x600? you lucky bastard
i was in college today, and the machine i was on had a res of 640x480
fortunately it has a vb compiler and the restriction on resultion in NT doesn't work if you use API calls. hooray for the only 1024x768 res in the room.
If the centre, or you have the resources - then think about talking to the young people who will be using the system about what should / shouldn't be available - and maybe even work with them to draw up an acceptable use policy (if neccessary).
That way, by consulting with them and involving them with the set up of the system, they'll gain more of a sense of ownership of it, leading to respect for the equipment - and, it will be set up to give them the maximum benefit in terms of what tools and programs are accessible and installed.
In our OSX lab, we don't let them burn cds ... They can't run most of the programs that came with OSX, like iMovie or the Address book....People, especially teenagers will want to push the rules just as far as they can, you have to lock them out of as much as possible.
That's why I hated school.
(Score:5, Informative)
That's why I view Slashdot as little more than entertainment.
Yes, that was the point. He's taking what the religious nuts say about (for example) homosexuality and turning it back at them, showing that the comments they direct at others could just as easily be applied to them.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
A classic, simple solution to potential problems with accidental misconfigurations, porn/mp3 surfing, virus dev/stalking/phishing misuse, etc.....
put the computer in the middle of the room, so that anybody and everybody can see the screen.
All may have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but nobody does if they're worried they're gonna get caught.
Well, since we're all so far OT (or are we, since this started out in the context of charitable giving of a computer to a church), I'll keep right on down that road.
:_)
Thank you. I'm sick and tired of all these atheists and their sympathizers forcing their beliefs (or lack thereof) on others. If they don't believe in God, why don't they just shut up and believe what they believe (or don't) privately instead of evangelizing it all over the place to the point where atheism is - gasp! - a de facto religion.
Don't you atheists hate it when someone turns your empty and bogus arguments against you?
I'll tell you a few things. First, nothing in the constitution says anyone has a right not to be offended, so if militant homosexuals can march in gay pride parades dressed as nuns and we Christians just have to shut up and take it because they are exercising their right to free speech, when we evangelize and preach the gospel of the Risen Christ, Savior of the world, you are going to just shut up and take it while we exercise our constitutional right to free speech. Who knows? A few of you might even be saved.
There are things that we all would be quite happy to see people shut up and not talk about. I don't like Nazis and what they say. I wish they'd shut up and go away. I dislike the KKK just as much. My wife isn't white and our children are half-white and half not, and they would say their is something wrong with me and them for that.
I don't like liberals who throw around the word Nazi as a term of derision for anyone they don't like and/or disagree with. It profanes what the millions of Jews and others suffered at the hands of real Nazis. I don't like conservatives who throw around the word communist about anyone they disagree with or don't like. It profanes what even greater numbers of people suffered at the hands of communist despots like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. There are real Communists and real Nazis out there, and we need to reserve those epithets for them.
I have a whole laundry list of words and thoughts I wish people would never say and never think. Those of you who disagree with me probably have a different but similarly long list of your own, and you don't like it when you hear people say that President Bush is a good and honest man and Saddam Hussein was and is an evil and dishonest one and the United States, Iraq, and the entire world are better off with him in a prison cell and Iraq on track for true sovereignty and free elections. It's funny that people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who were true liberals, have the most in common not with those who today call themselves liberals, but who call themselves conservatives. Most liberals have far more beliefs in common with dictators of the left or right (but mostly of the left) than they do with Washington, Jefferson, or any other true liberals. And I bet that truth hurts and you wish I'd shut up and not say it.
Tough. If you don't like freedom of speech, go move to some country that doesn't have it, and don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out. Just be sure you pick one that suppresses the kind of speech you don't like and allows that kind that you do, and hope they never change their minds on that and throw you in jail for speaking. Freedom of speech does not mean that you can say anything you want, while others have to shut theirs mouths and agree with you, or at least shut their mouths. You may not like to hear people talk about God in public, but it's their right. Live with it.
Finally, a word about "Forcing beliefs on others." A person speaking about God in a public place is forcing no belief on anyone. Indeed, that sort of thing usually comes from the left. Examples? Barring students from exercising their constitutional right to pray at school because you don't like it. "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or restricting the free exercise thereof." Most of you on the left like to pretend