Re: [little OT] Creating a public terminal

From: richard kirkcaldy (richard.kirkcaldy@ic24.net)
Date: Tue Jun 12 2001 - 23:30:37 CEST


12/06/01 13:48:00, Vesa-Pekka Palmu <depili@sci.fi> wrote:

>
>The terminal will be used for entertainment, In a childrens hospital, this is why windows is totally out of
question, as the configs would get messed in about 15 minutes by little "computer experts". So as the
computer woun't be containing any personal data, there is no need for separate logins for users. The plan is to
create a static system that woun't be destroyed by people unpluggin the computer when it is running etc.

@Entertainment in Linux? Are you joking? I can see why you don't want to run windows, but I was talking to a
technician at a local school the other day - and all their machines run windows, with a linux partition which is a
mirror of the windows partition how it should be with everything correctly setup.
Every time a student does something wrong, the techncians just boot into linux as root - and copy the files
back. Within 15 minutes they can have a whole classroom back up and running.
This is especcially effective as all student work is stored on a network server, and modern PC's all come with
hard drives which are too big for every day use.

>Ok, I have tought about using some of the liter wms, as the access when using them is easier to restric.
@If you aren't totally sure about setting up gnome/kde then yes. But security in all wm's is good.

>
>> @Why bother? Redhat is much more secure than MuLinux, and only root can access files outside of
anybody's
>> home area, access serial ports, or shutdown - unless permissions are changed as root.
>
>Well this is to ensure that when some litlle person presses the reset button the fs woun't get corrupted.
@Take the case apart, and remove the reset button - or padlock the case behind something. The new
journaling file systems will cope with that anyway. And I've never yet had any problems when I have pressed the
reset button, as long as I hadn't mounted the disk from another distro, though I agree you would be better safe
than sorry.

>If I tweak the wm so that there isn't a way to logout the user and start the X at boot time and restart it if it gets
killed (maybe making a script for this and adding that scrip to initab would work?)
@I don't remember - but you might be able to that in wmaker. Not sure about restarting if it gets killed, though I
guess it's possible.

>
>> Customizing RedHat is pretty easy if you use linuxconf and setup as root. Although the sendmail setup from
>> there is useless. And running RedHat means a lot of people will be able to help you.
>
>Well I will probably do it the redhat way, or if the mandrake seems good for the job I will use it.
@I've never used Mandrake, but I;ve heard a lot of people who are happy with it.

>
>
>The most recent plan of mine is also to create a bootable "rescue cd" that will automatically when booted fdisk
the hd, format and restore the box to the condition of fresh install, but I'm not sure how to do this.
@Well you can do a "kick boot" install with Redhat, though I've never used it. And you'll probably still have to do
some changing about. But it must be possible to do that kind of thing.

Actually while I think about it there's a howto on setting up something like this, though I don't know how relevent
it is - do a search for it on http://www.google.com/linux/

-- 
Richard Kirkcaldy, Richard.kirkcaldy@ic24.net
 
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: mulinux-unsubscribe@sunsite.dk
For additional commands, e-mail: mulinux-help@sunsite.dk


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Sat Feb 08 2003 - 15:27:19 CET