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Setting Up Mac OS X for a Teenage Coffeehouse?

Posted by simoniker on from the not-teenage-cathouse dept.

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."

4 of 348 comments (clear)

  1. Re:A great act of kindness! by lpangelrob2 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Interestingly enough, I just dumped my old PIII Dell on my church's doorstep too. Do I get any points for that? :-)

    As for the Mac... maybe you can set up a portal for your group. Either have it locally hosted on the Apache server on the Mac, or on the web. Safari can go to that page on startup. I don't know what you might want on it, but it's an option. Mine's pointing to a forum where people can leave messages right now... soon it'll have a link to pictures of the group.

    --
    -Rob
    Marriage doesn't have to suck!
  2. Re:A great act of kindness! by XryanX · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Aye, it seems that severely limiting their abilities within the system is the best way to go.

    When I was in high school, it was pretty common for people to type obscenities into the scrolling marquee screensaver. We eventually got blocked out of changing screensavers, and then desktops/resolution size, and then IE's homepage, etc.

    You do, however, have to be willing to take suggestions from the kids that will be using it. If they're locked out of a certain utility that they need/want to use, you should be willing to hear their reasoning. I know that I quit using the computers in high school when they locked the resolution at 800x600.

  3. Mac Kiosk by thebra · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How to set up a Mac as a Kiosk. Very informative!

  4. You think that's funny, but... by Scott+Richter · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Don't tell the church that your Mac OS X box will be full of daemons. They will get exorcized over it!

    Check this out