Community (Village) Communication Project

[Crushdepth]

I need a bit of advice: I am working on a project in Laos, which needs to set up a few computers for use by community groups (farmer collectives) in different villages. I won't go into the details, but basically they need to be able to communicate via Skype or equivalent, and the project requires that this include video, that's all they will be used for. I do not yet know if they will be connected via ADSL (my preference, but its very expensive in Laos) or 3G (latency problems?).

The key issue is that they will have near-zero on site technical support for most of the time (whatever I can provide remotely), so the machines must be reliable and self-maintaining. They will certainly be abused to some extent, visiting dodgy websites and you name it. So I'm looking at getting them Linux-based netbooks with integrated webcams, because they are cheap and less likely to get screwed over by viruses and flash-drive malware.

So my questions are:

* What's a good current model netbook?

* A good lightweight, USER FRIENDLYy Linux distro for people with ZERO prior experience with computers (we'll be training them, but still...)?

* I would like to set the machines to download patches automatically, without user intervention or having to enter an admin password, but no clue about how to arrange that.

Thanks for your help.

[dave_boo]

When you ask for "A good lightweight, USER FRIENDLYy Linux distro for people with ZERO prior experience with computers", I assume you're actually asking about the Desktop Enviroment? If so, than I can say that I am really partial to LXDE. You can set it up to be so minimal (both looks and memory usage) that it will withstand pretty much anybody picking away at it. Furthermore, it looks quite a bit like Windows in regards to the start menu which will ease transitions for those who are used to Microsoft's systems. If you want the easiest way of getting LXDE on an Ubuntu install, look into Lubuntu. See image at bottom of my post for an idea of what LXDE looks like.

If you're asking about a distro, than you need to choose what works for whomever is to provide the limited tech support. Ask 8 different Linux users the best distro and you'll be lucky to get only 11 responses. For instance I use OpenSuSE. I will admit though that the n00b-friendly nature of Ubuntu and derivatives (especially the polished Mint) attracts quite a bit of support. There is also some excellent forums and fairly good documentation regarding those two distros.... see I've the only answer so far and you have three different distros to choose from.

Creating a simple cron job to zypper update (apt-get update in Debian world) may be the best. I also found out that there is an interesting package for Debian that should ease setup of the job.

It would be extremely hard for a non-privileged user account to wreak serious havoc on the machine if running Linux; disable all the scripts in the web browser and that would make it very difficult for the end user to even pick something up on a USB stick or risk infecting others. If you wanted to really lock down the machine, password protect the bios, set grub for a 1/4 second, and ensure that when you set up "/" make it read only (ro option in fstab--this may require a separate partition for "/tmp" though...you could also maybe get away with mounting "/tmp" on "/dev/shm").

[Chicog]

I've never used it, but there is an application called "Ofris" which works like Deep Freeze does on Windows.

Essentially it "freezes" Linux so that no matter what gets done to it, when the PC is shut down and restarted, it will come back up in its original state.

At least that's what it's designed to do.

I can't tell you any more than that, but if you want to mitigate the effects of tinkerers, it might be useful to you.

http://www.unixmen.com/ofris-an-opensource-alternative-to-deep-freeze-application/

Edited September 24, 2012 by Chicog