Safe distro for high school computers?
 

The IT guy at school is showing interest for Linux. We have machines running XP and Ubuntu could almost do the job if it wasn't for the few people that know how to mess with it.

Do you people know of a good, safe distribution that can do the basic school computer tasks but that is also 100% safe? It would also need to erase its settings when shut down so it always reboot with the same config.

There's no such thing as a 100% safe operating system unless you disconnect it from the internet or any removable media and lock it in the closet where it can't do anything.

Aside from that, I found this link that shows how to reboot with the same config. A commercial software tool that does something similar is called DeepFreeze. You could probably also do this with tmpfs, loop devices, and permissions, but it may take some work on your part...

EDIT: There's also a hardware card called the "Reborn Card" from Lenten.

No. Pretty much anything could be configured to do what you say, but no distro that I can think of has the objective of doing exactly that and does it out of the box.

Local access is an issue that requires either special bios that doesn't allow usb boot or use wire delete on usb.

Then I'd for sure use a high grade firewall or as above just ban web access to school.

Might look at other distros made for schools and deploy across lan via pxe.

That ought to keep the little stinkers at bay.

I'd recommend Edubuntu:

http://www.edubuntu.org/

Here's an excerpt on how to lock-down:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Ed...0the%20system?