Shared Computer Toolkit

[BrokenReel]

I'm an employee at a small computer shop and currently we've been setting up internet kiosks for a few locations around our community for visitors and customers to quickly chekc their e-mail with several refurbished xp machines. We're currently using Microsoft's Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP. However we only have about 6 machines with XP on them an the rest have windows 2000 installed which is not compatible with the shared computer toolkit. We're trying to keep the costs on these machines down for people wanting to these set-up so we don't want to have to charge them all an extra 100 for an xp liscense and I would personally rather go with linux since I feel better about it's stability and security in a standalone unit. I'm a user and big fan of Linux Mint so I'd love to be able to use it in these kiosks.

The requirements for us are:

- We have one administrator account and accounts that lasts for 15, 30 and 60 minutes and then logs off.
- When the account is logged off any changes(downloaded files, cookies, setting changes, etc) are deleted.
- The user accounts are only allowed to access a limited set of programs, basically firefox and maybe a few other choice apps such as OpenOffice.

I don't know how feasible it would be for linux mint to implement this with a small GUI for administarting restrictions such as logoff time and program access or even how difficult this would be to do, but I'd love it if it were possible. Thanks.

[gcc]

not to knock your basic precept, but this is easily done with existing tools. I'm not on the dev team here, just saying- maybe the first thing to do would be to use the existing tools. if you need help setting it up I'll do what I can though.

[clem]

A very quick thought: use the liveCD.

You can run the client computers with the liveCD (it's easy to customize the liveCD to remove some applications), you don't even need a hard-drive... no account creation..

just remove ubiquity from the liveCD and all the programs you don't want them to run, remove the harddrives from the PCs and here you go.

Clem

[BrokenReel]

A very quick thought: use the liveCD.

You can run the client computers with the liveCD (it's easy to customize the liveCD to remove some applications), you don't even need a hard-drive... no account creation..

just remove ubiquity from the liveCD and all the programs you don't want them to run, remove the harddrives from the PCs and here you go.

Clem

My only thought about that is we would be connecting using a secured wifi network here is there anyway for the liveCD to actually remeber the wifi settings between reboots? Also the boot up time for the liveCD is less than optimal compared to a native install.