Hello everyone. I am in high school and made a mistake. I started to explain to my teacher how there are several distributions of Linux on live CD's. It took me a while to convince her that a whole OS could be on a CD. Now she wants me to look into using such a CD for our loaner laptops. All students have a laptop running two copies of Windows XP. One side is for their own, personal use. The other is for the school's network and school use only. The tech department doesn't want people to use the school half at home. Anyway, when a laptop breaks, it goes down (usually for several days) for repair. The student is issued a loaner laptop with a school side only. Some students use it as an excuse to not do their homework because they can not use the laptop at home. My teacher had the bright idea of using a live distro of Linux as a home side. That way, the student can use the computer at home and not save any files on the hard drive of the loaner. She wants them to be able to save to removable storage instead. Is there any way I can set up a Knoppix distro so that it can write to removable drives, but not to the HDD? I also need it so that computer savvy kids can not change it or somebody fooling around can not accidently change anything. Can I setup such a CD, or would I be better to write my own live version (based on Debian probably)?

You should be able to write to the usb stick by default. If when you plug it in it doesn't automount and appear on the desktop, look in storage media and it should be there, either single (or double) click it and it will mount and open up. They won't be able to change any settings unless they know the root password.

Mepis might best choice for this, it's light, has a very friendly/easy interface and runs well from CD and still has stuff like Open Office and good multimedia support.

Thanks. I'll look into Mepis. I know you can easily read and write to USB (or at least should be able to). The last time I tried, my drive wasn't recognized. I don't know why and it really doesn't matter as long as it usually works. The problem I need to know is if HDD access is restricted. They can not be able to write to the hard drive. If they do, they may screw up the Windows copy.