Making Linux Do Less
December 11th, 2008 by ComputerBob
Several days ago, I told you that I had set up several 10-year-old donated PCs for beginners to use in their homes. The rest of the story is that the computers were donated to the domestic violence center where I work as a volunteer, and the computer users are adult survivors of domestic violence who need computers to help them complete schoolwork so that they can get jobs and start new lives.
Then, once they can afford to buy new computers of their own, they will be expected to donate these old computers back to the domestic violence center so that I can send them out to other needy families.
Unfortunately, because I didn’t know enough about Linux at the time to be able to confidently configure secure, trouble-free computers for beginners to use without ongoing support, I reluctantly ended up installing Windows 98SE on the oldest PC and Windows XP on all of the rest.
I was disappointed — but not surprised — when, five days after the last of the PCs went out to their intended families, one woman called to say that her kids had been using the Windows 98SE computer and it was already infected with 39 viruses.
Even ignoring the fact that the computer is supposed to be for her use only and she’s not supposed to let anyone else use it, it’s obvious that Windows isn’t going to work for her. At least not for very long at a time.
So, I drove out to her home and picked up the infected PC.
The whole point of this project is to provide basic computers for doing basic adult schoolwork. That’s all. The people who receive them don’t need to learn anything about how computers work at this point, and they certainly don’t need their computers to perform entertainment tasks — they just need simple, reliable, easy-to-use computers that will perform a few basic tasks really consistently and securely.
So I decided that, instead of trying to “lock down and secure” those old versions of Windows — an impossible task with even the newest, more-bloated versions — I needed to use a lightweight version of Linux to create a PC appliance — a super-kiosk PC — that would serve just a few specific functions very, very well and very, very securely — on extremely old PC hardware. No multimedia, no bells and whistles — just word processing, spreadsheets, web browsing and a paint program, without the user having any access to any other software or any system configuration settings.
That’s why, on and off for the past several days, I figured out how to install and configure one of the newest versions of antiX Linux, “a fast, lightweight and easy to install linux live CD distribution based on MEPIS.”
It’s pretty easy to install and configure antiX to its basic “out-of-the-box” functionality. The harder part was figuring out how to make it do less than the hundreds of things that it’s normally capable of doing. I like to think of it as “making the Maserati street-legal.”
By carefully editing antiX’s Fluxbox configuration files, I was able to reduce its main applications menu to just the few that I wanted. Then I added secret hotkeys that will allow only me to gain access to all of the “under the hood” settings — and a desktop wallpaper that shows the domestic violence center’s logo and reminds the user to donate the computer back to us when they no longer need it.
It’s almost done. It boots up using only 26MB of the PC’s 128MB of RAM, and using only 1% of its Pentium II CPU at idle. I hope to deliver it back to the user within the next couple of days, when our schedules coincide.
Now that I know how to configure antiX/Fluxbox the way I want, I hope to install either antiX or some other lightweight Linux operating system on every donated computer from now on — and on any of the other Windows computers that come back to me filled with viruses.
Here’s a screenshot that shows one of the stock antiX desktop wallpapers with my edited Fluxbox applications menu:
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Tags:
Domestic Violence, Education, Internet, Linux, Personal, Security, Survivors, Tech Support, Windows
July 17th, 2011 at 12:59 am
I like what you did here, although I believe editing antiX’s IceWM desktop with icon support would have given the user a friendlier, more Windows-like experience while still giving you the control to only allow them access to what they need.
July 17th, 2011 at 8:07 am
I agree — after I wrote this article, I added desktop icons for those four application choices and a “My Documents” folder.
I also created a custom desktop background that contained the charity’s logo and a message, reminding them to return the computer when they were done with it, so that it could be given to someone else.