Don't flip-flop on this subject. You wanted a dead easy system for people you know that are computer illiterate, that they couldn't possibly screw-up, that wouldn't get infected, that wouldn't leave personal info on the system. I gave that to you. DSL or KioskCD. If you start trying to make a thinclient system you run into a real big problem, a server. You need something to host the OS image and apps they use. This requires a separate box, just so some people can surf. This only makes sense if you have a setup with multiple stations for surfing. Say in a library, school, business, shopping mall or if you have a passel of kids like hald and you want several similar, low requirement PCs so each may have their own. And it requires someone that knows how to setup and maintain the setup.

If a person has broadband and ONE PC, you need something that will just boot and go. If you have 2 or more, you need either a firewall appliance, router, wifi/switch/router, gateway PC, whatever. One of the good points about a KisokCD if you have one PC is that you don't have to worry about viruses, trojans, spyware, adware, zombies, anything like that. Set your kid loose for his allotted hour after booting to the KioskCD and then reboot the PC without it when he is done.

If your friend or whatever graduates from just web browsing or wants a more capable, yet still simple, low requirement system, you can give him a full DSL distro. What is the big deal?

If you still want to go the thinclient route, look at http://www.thinstation.org/ You can build your own CD from that and it is as small as you will likely get. You can even use ThinStation-O-Matic to customize it. http://struktur.kemi.dtu.dk/thinstation/TSoM/ Just be careful on the page where it allows you to load a build image. If you just went thru and made all kinds of changes, you don't want to hit the "load" button. It makes changes to the selections to match the example build files or your custom build file you created before. This TSoM looks a lot like what we were talking about in IRC the other day for an online custom ISO build setup.

-----Original Message----- From: Oren Beck Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2007 12:14 PM

On 1/23/07, David Nicol wrote:

...

On 1/23/07, Oren Beck wrote:

...

Ok- When I mentioned usability - it meant to appliance operators.

Hmm. network drivers plus X plus lwm and instead of giving any kind of log-in the system just starts Firefox? AJAX

drag-and-drop kinds of things live inside the web browser (the ghost of

a fifteen year old

...

issue of "InfoMoment" screams "you mean the thin client?") instead of

in the

...

window manager, so they aren't a problem.

Let the appliance operators use the Google document editors if they must have productivity software.

The summary of your comments to my understanding is calling for a "thin client". Ok- let-s work with this a bit- how thin can we go?

What of a floppy based or CD based distro that has the minimal hardware detect to bring up a net session, then by default bring up a browser with any advanced config done thru web interfaces. That is, if the target users for this proposal even would do so. The kiosk mode locking is indeed a Very Good Thing for public users or the skill lacking relatives we support. Then again- an intermediate level of "are you sure?" guarded settings may cover the exceptions.