Urgent: Need help finding a linux distro appropriate for a guest PC at work.

In My Humble Opinion
1

I work in a reception at a hotel and like most modern hotels, we have a wireless internet connection for our guests as well as a computer for the guests to use if they don’t have laptops and need to read their mail, do their banking or whatever.

However, the computer has been allowed to go used unchecked and has by now accumulated a small host of bugs, creeps, crawlers, cookie-monsters, fungal infections and virii. I’m not a great technical mind - hobby-oriented gaming, mostly, but I do build my own computers and my command-line-fu is strong - but aside from another guy, I’m the closest we’ve got to a techie. And right now the mood is right with the regulars to just format it and find a Linux distro.

So, having a bit of spare time in the night shifts, I’ve volunteered to find and install one. But after tomorrow night, I’ve got about two weeks off and I seriously don’t want to come in during that time to troubleshoot or fix, so I’m looking for something easy and intuitive, preferrably with a Windows-like graphical interface.

Preferrably free, but I might be willing to part with some cash if I can get two licenses (one for myself - my new Acer Aspire One 110 comes with Linpus Linux installed, which is great and all, but if I find something better . . . ).

And since Linux is really something I haven’t touched all that much, I’d prefer an easy-to-install distro, preferrably with a comprehensive readme :stuck_out_tongue: (I do know my way around a terminal and my wget/sudo-fu is strong)

These things would be nice, too:

  • Ability to install FireFox easily.
  • Preferrably not too much coding/compiling necessary to install programs, as that takes a while. (<3 .rpms)
  • Flash
  • Office or OpenOffice available and workable.
  • Hard to fuck up.
  • .PDF reader available.
  • A pony.

So, techie dopers - halp!

:stuck_out_tongue:

2

With many modern distributions, you will find that standard programs are installed from a GUI-based installer where you select your desired application, click, and it gets downloaded and installed with little action. It’s unlikely you would need to do your own compiling for any of the “vanilla” applicaitons you are likely to want in your circumstances.

I would give serious throught to two issues - how old is the PC? Is it old enough to be underpowered, low-memory, slow CPU, etc? If so, then you may need to look at various minimal distributions (DSL, Puppy) designed to work on underpowered machines. Otherwise, go with one of the very popular distributions (Ubuntu, Mandriva, etc) and you will find that most of what you want is already included or easily downloaded.

More serious for your purpose - most of the people who sit at your machine will be Windows oriented. Go for a simple desktop that won’t confuse these people too much. Given a choice between KDE and Gnome, for example, I would opt for Gnome because the menu structure is simpler, more intuitive (IMO) to a Windows user, and because fewer of the standard applications are hidden behind cryptic application names.

3

Try a Linux distro that runs from cd.
or
Use a virtual machine environment that will start back how it was every time you boot.

Example product Returnil Virtual System 2008 selling for about $25

The above is a Windows based one. You’ll have to look for yourself for a free one that works with whatever you decide to install.

4

From the little that I worked with Ubuntu, I think it fits the bill.

5

You want to put a non-standard OS on a computer that will be used by the public? This sounds like a really bad idea. Hope you have time for a lot of tech support. Seriously, people get wigged out even by FireFox on a Windows machine instead of IE because they don’t know that they can use something besides IE to browse the Internet. Do you really want to put up with the headaches of non-tech people using something completely unfamiliar?

6

I have no experience with them, but it sounds to me like you want a Linux Kiosk. An extreme example would be a dedicated solution such as Linutop (not what you want, but I thought it would be nice to provide a link). There are other methods also, such as Webconverger, or you might want to look at a HOWTO (that one relies on SLAX; I’m sure there’s something similar for Damn Small Linux also). It looks like you can set up KDE in Kiosk Mode, and it would seem that there’s a MozDev project devoted to this.

The option with the least effort, however, would likely be to find a LiveCD distro (one that doesn’t include an Install to Hard Disk option) and reboot it periodically (possibly with the added step of wiping the hard disk each time, if you leave one in the system). Running from CD is always slow, though, so that may not be desireable; perhaps a distro that runs from a USB key would be better.

Again, though, I’ve no experience with this and cannot personally recommend any particular distro.