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."

Comments

Save yourself time

[slipnslidemaster]

I would save yourself and the church some time and aggrevation by just keeping an image of the freshly installed hard drive and instructions on how to re-image the computer handy.

consider Linux

[dekeji]

You may also want to consider installing Linux on it. Linux requires less compute power than OS X and runs better on low-end machines. Also, distributions like Debian and YDL come with lots of pre-installed applications, including many educational apps, games, and office apps.