Next year, I'd like to put together a demonstration of how Linux could be used at a school. I've been looking at the printers they use. They all seem to be compatible (HP Printers ^_^)

I'm trying to decide what distro to use. These things have to be kept in mind:

-Must be able to install on a Filesystem that can stand to be on a computer that just gets shut off. The students at this school have no idea that you can corrupt data by just turning it off.

-I must be able to set it up so that it will run a cron job and update the system and there should be NO user intervention in this (except for root). It shouldn't HAVE to reboot, except for kernel upgrades.

As much as I hate to say this, Debian is looking like what I'd need to use. Slackware with slapt-get isn't realisitically going to keep things as up to date as I'd like. And both support Reiser, which seems to handle being powered off decently.

If I would choose Debian, what release would you suggest? Sid would probably be a little dangerous, since I'm running automatic updates and saying yes whenever prompted. Woody or Sarge?

If you have any other suggestions distro wise, I'd appreciate it.

I'd go for Sarge, Woody would probably give a bad impression ( It is old ), and its not going to out live the summer.

If you do require some things more up to date you can have a Sarge system, and download specific stuff from Sid. So if say you want XFree86 4.3, KDE3.2 and GNOME2.6 Thats all possible, and the rest of the system will still be Sarge.

http://www.knoppix.org/

or

http://www.morphix.org/