The locked-down desktop

[Mike Newman]

Hi all,

I've been thinking about this idea of the "average user," who wants to
surf the web, do light word processing, check their e-mail, and play
FreeCell.

So, I'm thinking that if you were to create a custom distro install
for this purpose, you could boot to a friendly splash screen and
auto-login as a user who can only run these programs.

Also, external drives and cameras should be mounted and appear on the
desktop automagically.

I guess my first question is: has anyone done something like this before?
Othewise:
* How would you restrict which executables they could run? grsecurity?
* What would be an easy way for the user to configure PPP (IMO the
only thing they should have to configure)?
* Any ideas as to how *you* could push out updates to this setup?
* Automounting? The last time that I experimented with this there was
something called "supermount" and most users agreed that it was
broken.

My personal opinion is that the "average user" is certainly capable of
learning to effectively use the Unix CLI, let alone GNOME or KDE.
However, I don't think that plunking a newbie down in front of Windows
XP Home and leaving them to it is very productive, either.
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