Setting Up Mac OS X for a Teenage Coffeehouse?

WCityMike writes "I plan to donate a grape iMac to a local church-run non-profit coffeehouse for teenagers, and would like to give it to them appropriately set up for the atmosphere it'll be in. I'm seeking advice on a number of fronts - what freeware or shareware applications would be good for such an environment? Should visitors be allowed to have their own accounts (presumably created by the administrator), or should I just set up one 'student' account and one 'administrator' account? If the latter, is there a way to prevent students from saving things on the hard drive (thus forcing them to use a diskette and/or the CD drive?), and/or a 'Simple Finder' interface extant for OS X? Is there existing software that makes this easier or more configurable, or is it all inside the OS? I'm fairly familiar with Mac OS X, but have never needed to run anything outside a single-user environment."

A great act of kindness!

[erick99 (743982)]

First, I think it's wonderful that you are donating the computer as well as your time. Good for you!

I would set up an admin account and several "template" accounts based on different types of usage such as "internet only," "power user," etc. You get the idea.

I would then train someone within the organization on how to setup, modify, and maintain the accounts (unless that is going to be you.).

Once again, your generosity of money and time is commendable.

Happy Trails!

Erick

Re:A great act of kindness!

[OECD (639690)]

I would then train someone within the organization on how to setup, modify, and maintain the accounts (unless that is going to be you.).

That's key--I would make it a condition of the donation, unless you want to spend a lot more time re-jiggering that computer later. I can guarantee that even if they know what they want to do with it now, they'll come up with something different/additional within a month.

Better off teaching them to fish.

Re:A great act of kindness!

[lullabud (679893)]

That's key--I would make it a condition of the donation, unless you want to spend a lot more time re-jiggering that computer later. I can guarantee that even if they know what they want to do with it now, they'll come up with something different/additional within a month.

Very true, there's a good chance that whatever the case is they'll call you back one of these days to fix/update/change it. I'd make sure to create a disk image of the hard drive after you've set it all up. That way when they call you back you can just boot into target-disk mode and restore the original image, make any tweaks from there, then re-image. I do this same thing in Windows using Norton Ghost and it's a HUGE time saver. Luckily OS X has this functionality all built in with the Disk Utility.

Re:A great act of kindness!

[lpangelrob2 (721920)]

Interestingly enough, I just dumped my old PIII Dell on my church's doorstep too. Do I get any points for that? :-)

As for the Mac... maybe you can set up a portal for your group. Either have it locally hosted on the Apache server on the Mac, or on the web. Safari can go to that page on startup. I don't know what you might want on it, but it's an option. Mine's [fycfreefall.org] pointing to a forum where people can leave messages right now... soon it'll have a link to pictures of the group.

Re:A great act of kindness!

[violajack (749427)]

Multiple accounts is definintely an easy way to go. You only need one "admin" account with the ability to install stuff. Give that password only to the person in charge of the machine.

In the Users pane of System Prefs you can create a student account and then click on capabilities and pretty much block them out of everything.

In our OSX lab, we don't let them burn cds or open most of the utilites (including system prefs). They can't run most of the programs that came with OSX, like iMovie or the Address book. We just set up a new cafe image with only a browser and the most popular chat clients in the dock, and then turned off that user's ability to change the dock. The "Cafe" user only has the capability to run those programs. Simple Finder is also a good idea.

Once, we accidentally left some of the system prefs access on and the machine had a new desktop background within hours. People, especially teenagers will want to push the rules just as far as they can, you have to lock them out of as much as possible.

Re:A great act of kindness!

[XryanX (775412)]

Aye, it seems that severely limiting their abilities within the system is the best way to go.

When I was in high school, it was pretty common for people to type obscenities into the scrolling marquee screensaver. We eventually got blocked out of changing screensavers, and then desktops/resolution size, and then IE's homepage, etc.

You do, however, have to be willing to take suggestions from the kids that will be using it. If they're locked out of a certain utility that they need/want to use, you should be

Re:A great act of kindness!

[mattyrobinson69 (751521)]

80x600? you lucky bastard

i was in college today, and the machine i was on had a res of 640x480

fortunately it has a vb compiler and the restriction on resultion in NT doesn't work if you use API calls. hooray for the only 1024x768 res in the room.

Re:A great act of kindness!

[hoist2k (601872)]

I set up a similar lab about 6 months ago. Went with eMacs, which have been stellar - almost zero problems. I was amazed at how well they stand up to abuse from kids, who can manage to obliterate a wintel box in a matter of minutes. I set up 2 accounts - an admin and a regular user. I actually had 4 machines networked together with the same accounts on all of them. The user accounts were somewhat restricted, just using the built-in user settings. As for shared disk space, the kids can save in their home directory if they want, but learn very quickly that it's not a good idea. Teach them how to use online storage (yahoo briefcase, xdrive, whatever) and burn CDs and they'll never go back to using the hard-drive again. It's not much different than college computer labs - sure you can save stuff on the drives, but the chances of it being there when you get back are quite slim. Also, encourage them to bring in their CDs and rip them to the harddrive - it's fun to see HUGE iTunes libraries (although it makes you feel really old). It also gets kids excited about "doing" things other than playing games & chatting.

Re:A great act of kindness!

[Grant_Watson (312705)]

Please, please, please keep your religion out of our streets, office buildings, schools and government. These are common spaces which we'll have to share with you even if we don't share your religion.

This is way OT (go, go gadget karma!), but couldn't the same thing be said about politics, or any strongly-held belief?

Is it at all reasonable to expect that what people believe will not affect what they do in the public sphere?

Re:A great act of kindness!

[gujo-odori (473191)]

Well, since we're all so far OT (or are we, since this started out in the context of charitable giving of a computer to a church), I'll keep right on down that road.

Thank you. I'm sick and tired of all these atheists and their sympathizers forcing their beliefs (or lack thereof) on others. If they don't believe in God, why don't they just shut up and believe what they believe (or don't) privately instead of evangelizing it all over the place to the point where atheism is - gasp! - a de facto religion.

Don't you atheists hate it when someone turns your empty and bogus arguments against you? :_)

I'll tell you a few things. First, nothing in the constitution says anyone has a right not to be offended, so if militant homosexuals can march in gay pride parades dressed as nuns and we Christians just have to shut up and take it because they are exercising their right to free speech, when we evangelize and preach the gospel of the Risen Christ, Savior of the world, you are going to just shut up and take it while we exercise our constitutional right to free speech. Who knows? A few of you might even be saved.

There are things that we all would be quite happy to see people shut up and not talk about. I don't like Nazis and what they say. I wish they'd shut up and go away. I dislike the KKK just as much. My wife isn't white and our children are half-white and half not, and they would say their is something wrong with me and them for that.

I don't like liberals who throw around the word Nazi as a term of derision for anyone they don't like and/or disagree with. It profanes what the millions of Jews and others suffered at the hands of real Nazis. I don't like conservatives who throw around the word communist about anyone they disagree with or don't like. It profanes what even greater numbers of people suffered at the hands of communist despots like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. There are real Communists and real Nazis out there, and we need to reserve those epithets for them.

I have a whole laundry list of words and thoughts I wish people would never say and never think. Those of you who disagree with me probably have a different but similarly long list of your own, and you don't like it when you hear people say that President Bush is a good and honest man and Saddam Hussein was and is an evil and dishonest one and the United States, Iraq, and the entire world are better off with him in a prison cell and Iraq on track for true sovereignty and free elections. It's funny that people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who were true liberals, have the most in common not with those who today call themselves liberals, but who call themselves conservatives. Most liberals have far more beliefs in common with dictators of the left or right (but mostly of the left) than they do with Washington, Jefferson, or any other true liberals. And I bet that truth hurts and you wish I'd shut up and not say it.

Tough. If you don't like freedom of speech, go move to some country that doesn't have it, and don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out. Just be sure you pick one that suppresses the kind of speech you don't like and allows that kind that you do, and hope they never change their minds on that and throw you in jail for speaking. Freedom of speech does not mean that you can say anything you want, while others have to shut theirs mouths and agree with you, or at least shut their mouths. You may not like to hear people talk about God in public, but it's their right. Live with it.

Finally, a word about "Forcing beliefs on others." A person speaking about God in a public place is forcing no belief on anyone. Indeed, that sort of thing usually comes from the left. Examples? Barring students from exercising their constitutional right to pray at school because you don't like it. "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or restricting the free exercise thereof." Most of you on the left like to pretend

Re:What I would do

[The Infamous Grimace (525297)]

'Ditto' will also do it, you one feels up to the command line. Ditto is a tool developed by Apple to replace cp, which doesn't know about certain Apple attributes, such as resource forks. It also allows for permissions to be retained.

(tig)

Mac OS X Hints

[El Neepo (411885)]

http://www.macosxhints.com/ [macosxhints.com] is a great place to start looking for the misc answers you may need.

Re:Mac OS X Hints

[EvilAlien (133134)]

In addition to the MacOS X specific sites, this might be useful: Open Kiosk [sourceforge.net].

Image it before you turn everyone loose!

[jarich (733129)]

Image it first, because no matter what you do, someone will somehow find a way to trash it or release a virus or the hard drive will crash or lightning will strike it or....

Apple does it...

[wfolta (603698)]

Stop by an Apple store if you can. They give more free reign on their computers than you would, since people need to try them out.

I've noticed that every night at closing time, a cron job or something fires off and all the machines put up a screen saying something like "Updating from image" and are evidently reloading themselves from a saved image to overcome the day's fiddling and messing up by customers.

Mac OS X does support limits.

[gotr00t (563828)]

Even though Mac OS X does not give the administrator as much control as other *NIX like systems (admin is not root, for example), it is possible to use the "system preferences" to limit the access of other users.

You can prevent them from rearranging the desktop, writing to any folder except their own in the /Users/ directory, and taking off/putting stuff onto the dock. At a lab that I administered for a while, I just put a student and admin account on each computer, and it worked well. The users were able to use applications like InDesign and Photoshop perfectly, and they kept their files on USB flash drives.

Take a look at

[hackstraw (262471)]

This pdf link [macosxlabs.org]. It tells you how to restore a dummy user's home directory after each login (Its for OSX, not sure if the grape can handle that or not).

Aside from some software tweaking and installation, this should really help your setup.

Look at the Accounts preference

[Nick of NSTime (597712)]

In the Accounts preference in Panther, you can turn on a sort-of Simple Finder, as well as limit access to specific applications for users. You should play around with those options to get an idea of what you can do.

macosxlabs.org

[daveschroeder (516195)]

You're essentially looking to do the same thing many, many others have already done, and are doing every day, with Mac OS X in public lab-type environments. Do yourself a favor and visit

http://macosxlabs.org/ [macosxlabs.org]

...particularly the documentation [macosxlabs.org] section.

Good intentions misplaced

[agentZ (210674)]

You heart is in the right place for wanting to donate your old machine, but the grape iMacs are significantly less secure than the tangerine ones. Be careful!

Re:Good intentions misplaced

[Lurker McLurker (730170)]

You call that a problem?

It's nothing that a good lick of paint won't fix.

Well...

[cot (87677)]

if they're anything like the teenagers I grew up with, trust them with nothing and they'll be needing lots of porn.

Word of advice

[toupsie (88295)]

Don't tell the church that your Mac OS X box will be full of daemons. They will get exorcized over it!

You think that's funny, but...

[Scott Richter (776062)]

Don't tell the church that your Mac OS X box will be full of daemons. They will get exorcized over it!

Check this out [jesussave.us]

Accounts

[huge (52607)]

No matter what platform you are using, I'd suggest that you create just one account for the end-users. As always, keep it simple.

Mac OS X Labs

[by Anonymous Coward]

Look at Mac OS X Labs [macosxlabs.org]. They have a lot of experience in setting up machines in school labs (read: hostile environments).

If anyone would have info on locking down a system they would.

A few questions and comments

[dgallina (665193)]

You didn't really specify what the machine would be used for. I'm assuming, given the environment, that it will be used mostly for Internet surfing & email. Unless you or another admin is going to be available to maintain user accounts, I *would* use a generic account for the users and a well-protected admin account. The Panther (10.3) finder *does* have a Simple Finder option. You can turn it on in the Accounts preferences pane after you create the user account. It gives you (some) options for limiting what the users are & aren't allowed to change as regards the desktop interface. If you need more granular control of applications or rights, you can add/remove apps from the machine and you can change the access rights via the underying UNIX group and permissions system. That level of detail might be more than you need or that you can administer, however, if you're not somewhat familiar with the UNIX underpinnings. In terms of recommended software: you definately want to supplement or replace IE with Safari and/or some of the Mozilla-derived browsers (Camino, Mozilla, Firefox). The various security glitches and pop-ups inherent in IE could make it a risk. You may want to consider adding some remote control software in case you have to remotely assist somebody or fix the machine remotely. Timbuktu and Apple Remote Desktop are popular commercial options. You might find something like VNC preferable for this environment, however, as it's free and relatively lightweight. All of these remote control options assume a broadband connection. You may also consider enabling remote SSH access if you need a lighter (terminal-only) remote admin mechanism. You *definately* want to turn the OSX built-in firewall on assuming that this machine will be directly connected to the Internet. The basic options are easy to setup via the sharing and related preference panes. You might also consider an anti-virus application such as Virex or Symantec NAV. I don't consider these critical for my personal use since there is so little OSX virus activity, but it's probably better to be prudent on a shared machine. Since this scenario uses a shared guest account on the machine, you'll probably want to avoid letting users use local mail applications such as Mail.App . Suggest that a web-mail interface might be simpler and require less maintenance on your part. Good luck

Knoppix

[Angry Black Man (533969)]

I know it wont work for you, sicne your donating an iMac (i dont believe Knoppix is available for PPC's), but I recently setup a school computer lab and found the best solution to keep the computers working is just leave a knoppix cd in the drive and use knoppix live cd as the OS.

They can listen to their music, compose documents (OO), browse the web with flash, install plugins for firefox (granted its linux so they cant install much), etc. Plus, some of the older kids even like to mess around in linux to learn it a bit. They can do anything that they need to, and the best part: no matter what, when they reboot the computer is back to normal.

I've seen similar windows software (fortess, deep freeze), but they all resulted in crippled systems (fortress wouldnt let you right click because then you could potentially disable the program). I also was able to get around deep freeze in high school in about 30 minutes, and Im sure some smart student can bypass fortress if they truly wanted to (it was not used when i was in school). Knoppix, however, is not subject to such vulnerabilities and provides more functionality. Plus, its free and 3rd party apps can cost a heapload.

Seriously, if you're doing a project like this guy with x86's, at least consider knoppix as an option. It really does have a lot of pro's.

OSX Kiosk Program

[w00k13 (587685)]

I have never used it. But here is an application to make it into a kiosk. Good Luck.

http://www.ncsu.edu/mac/software/webXkiosk.html [ncsu.edu]

-Adam

Add some sort of movement detector

[Xargle (165143)]

so Fonzie can get free credit when he kicks it. Aaaaaaaaaaaay!

Same Deal at our Library

[Vertig0gitreV (554511)]

I have basically done the same thing with 4 iMacs (233Mhz 320mb RAM)I donated to my local public library. They are used as internet/office/iTunes/AIM stations in a young adults room (grades 4-9). They are currently running 10.3.4 with shadow killer (a MUST for older machines running 10.x. Found at http://www.haxies.com ).

I set mine up with an Admin account (named staff) and a simple finder account (named student). Just go into the UserAccount section of system preferences, set the account you want limited to "simple finder" and limit what else you don't want them to have access to. It is also handy to give them a little bit of space to use for autosave in office and such (or scratch disks in Photoshop).

I have attempted to do similar limitations for the Windows XP computers in the adult section of the library (Using XP Security Console plug-in by Doug Knox), but have had nowhere near the success as I have had with the Macs. They have been running for a year now with ZERO down time.

Good Luck!!

Tar

[zeek3 (686479)]

I currently admin about 25 public Macs running OS X. What we currently do have two accounts- one guest and one admin. A clean copy of the guest account is kept compressed (tar) on the hard drive. At startup, the old guest home folder is removed and replaced the with backup that has nothing extra there. This saves lots of headaches since problems can usually be fixed with a restart. Couple that with some creative permissions and SetFile (found in developer tools) to make unnecessary things invisible and you have a secure workstation that can be put back to like-new condition with only a reboot.

One Word: DriveShield

[_Bunny (90075)]

Take a tip from an administrator in a public school system:

Pick up a copy a copy of DriveShield [centuriontech.com] for the Mac, and allow the students to do whatever they wish to it.

DriveShield is a driver that sits between the hard drive and the OS. Any writes made to the hard drive are redirected into a sratch area of the hard drive, and thus don't stick around for the next reboot. The machine will be back in the state it was in when it was locked on every reboot.

I've tested it by even booting off a System CD and reformatting the drive... on the next reboot it comes right back to how you expect!

The philosophy used to be to lock the machine down as tight as possible to prevent the users from making any changes to it. (Restricted Finder, Windows Policies, etc.) Products like DriveShield (DeepFreeze is another one) work differently -- they don't lock down the machine to the user at all, they just prevent any changes from sticking across a reboot.

Protect the machine with DriveShield (or something similar), and have all the kids log in as the admin. Quick and easy to do, and the kids don't have to be restricted to a limited set of options on the computer!

We've been using this technique in several of our schools now (only in the open labs, mind you -- not the staff computers!), and the only support calls we now recieve in those labs is for hardware problems, not software.

- Bunny

No prob.

[cbiffle (211614)]

Disclaimer: I didn't use OSX before Panther, so this may not apply to the version you have.

Simple Finder is an incredible pain in the ass and confuses the hell out of Windows users. My girlfriend is largely computer-illiterate (she's memorized the motions and screen locations needed to operate Office, but not much else). I set up a limited account on my iBook because she couldn't seen to get to the web browser without dragging my Terminal icon off the dock. But that's a diatribe for another time.

I set up Simple Finder. No good. I can't blame her -- I couldn't really figure out how to get much actual work done with it.

In the end, I've been using a straight Limited Account for my Guest acct on the laptop, with much success. MacOS X already does a good job of keeping users out of one anothers' stuff, by properly setting homedir modes and whatnot. I've been working for a couple of weeks to bypass the Limited Account limitations, without luck. If you declare that the user cannot run a particular application, I haven't figured out a way around it that doesn't require admin.

However, unlike my experience with Windows, a limited account on OS X is still quite usable. Programs don't automatically expect to have root, and aren't able to sneak off and get it without asking (*cough*WinIE*cough*). If the need arises, the Auth Services password-dialog provides a way for an employee to work magic if necessary.

My recommendations, therefore:
1. Set up a 'Managed' account for the coffee people. Don't do per-user accounts unless you want to set up an LDAP server to handle it; cloning account settings on a single-user MacOS X system is a bitch. Retain an admin account for the employees.
2. Whitelist, not blacklist, the apps the user can run. Give them access to Safari and whatever else. Don't let them dork with the dock, etc. Specifically allowing access to a handful of apps will prevent them from firing up a new one from a USB key. Because they'll try. Oh, they'll try.
3. Unfortunately, I'd recommend against giving them iChat. iChat, unlike Windows AIM and GAIM, doesn't give you an easy way to switch accounts -- which is a must-have on a public terminal.
4. Lock down the keychain. Set Safari to not save passwords. Locking the keychain (with some known but non-obvious password) will prevent users from saving new items into it. This is a good thing.
5. Giving access to iTunes puts you in an interesting legal gray area. Like iChat, it provides no easy way to change accounts (in terms of iTMS). It also enables users to rip CDs. This may not be a good idea.
6. Unfortunately, OS X does not provide disk quotas, as far as I can tell (please, if someone knows different, clue me in!). The support is there in the filesystem, but there doesn't appear to be a UI. Keep this in mind.
7. As admin, periodically use Repair Permissions in Disk Utility to check for anything that's become accessible to the peons. More importantly, do this after you're done with the initial software install -- you'd be amazed at how much commercial software starts out world-writeable. (Bad Adobe.)

Good luck!

What I did.

[pavon (30274)]

I just did something simular a few months ago. My dad is a highschool teacher and runs the "Tech" lab at the school. It has been a windows only lab, but after seeing how easy iMovie is to learn he has been wanting to get some Macs for a while now. Well the district just gave him money for two Macs, and since he isn't familiar with them I helped with integrating them into the Network and locking them down. Here is what I did.

You can lock down alot of things inside the users preferences. For example, you can specify that they are not allowed to changed any system settings (including those that would only effect their account like wallpaper), which applications they are allowed to run, and whether they can edit the doc. I locked all of these down, disallowing running the chat application and other things that they didn't need to be doing in class. I also locked down the terminal and disallowed >console login to prevent them from getting around what I had locked down. Anyway look there before you do anything else.

Not being a networking expert myself I didn't know if it was possible to have the kids logon to the windows domain, and automatically mount a home directory across the network (via smb). Furthermore it would a pain to manually recreate all those users, and I didn't have enough time to make an automated solution from scratch. So instead I just setup a single student account, and then wrote a script to mount thier network directories. I put a shortcut to the script in the doc. I also showed my dad how to create normal accounts, so that if a trustworthy student needs to do more than he can with the locked down student account he could give them an individual account.

For your purposes the big question is do the need to be saving things to the harddrive. If the answer is no (and I would expect it to be since they it is basically acting like a public terminal), just go with a single account. That will suffice for most people, and you can make special accounts for special cases.

As far as locking down the harddrive, by default they are restricted to /Users/student/ anyway. For our purposes this was good enough. All the windows computers had a program which restored the computer to a pristene state every time it was reboot, so the students were well trained that they needed to store everything on disc or thier network drive if they didn't want it to be lost. We were considering making a script that did the same to /Users/student, but decided it wasn't necisarry. The only potential problem would be if a kid messed with settings in /Users/student/Library/ that caused the program to behave unexpectedly. So we made a backup of that folder which the administrator can copy over the bad one if that does happen.

Actually I don't even know if it would be possible to completely lock the students out of using the harddrive altogether. Of course it would be trivial to just chown /Users/student to root and only give student read access, but you might run into problems. Things like programs complaining about not being able to save settings, or access a cache and temporary files in the home directory. You would have to play around with that.

Anyway I hope that helped.

A Few Potential Problems

[bfg9000 (726447)]

I've thought of a few potential problems:

Caffeine is a so-called "gateway drug", which can eventually lead to other things such as juice or even pop. Think twice before unleashing the power of coffee on unsuspecting teenagers. I wish someone had warned me when I was a teen. Look at me now, hanging out on Slashdot all day and drinking coffee*. Don't let it happen again.

If the Church is Amish, there may be problems with the iMac, being high technology and all. If they're against technology, give them an old Windows PC, there's less innovation in Win98 than a rusted salad fork, so it should be acceptable to even the most orthodox old dudes.

If these teenagers are anything like the teens I know, no matter what you do, one of them will have root access before you finish installing. Let them admin it, if you're over 30 they probably know more than you do anyway. It's sad that my non-computer-using wife can give me OS X tips, simply because she doesn't have to unlearn years of Windows and doing things the hard way.

* Even though the link between caffeine and Slashdot hasn't been proven to be cause and effect, empirical analysis supports the hypothesis. So monitor the system for warning signs, such as Slashdot being bookmarked.

A few misc. thoughts.....

[King_TJ (85913)]

First of all, best of luck with this! I think it's a great idea. (Among other things, teens are already hanging out at several coffee houses in my area, and since they are commercial/for-profit establishments, it's a pretty expensive pastime for them. A non-profit version geared just for them might help them socialize without loads of cash getting pried from their fingers at the same time.)

But back to the Mac, have you considered the possibility of just using MacOS 9.1 on the grape iMac instead of OS X? I know this might seem foolish, but I bring it up for a couple reasons.

1. There's an excellent program for locking down a MacOS 9.1 (or earlier) desktop environment, called FoolProof. It's usually used in educational settings, but it's a very flexible way to prevent people from saving files to specific devices, deleting or rearranging icons on the desktop, and so on. (And yes, it even prevents people from trying to bypass it by booting without extensions enabled.) FoolProof is commercial software, but there's a good chance someone might have a copy they're no longer using that they could donate to the cause.

2. MacOS 9.1 would run much faster on an older iMac than OS X does, so it might give a better user experience in that respect.

3. You won't have a great choice of web browsers under MacOS 9.x - but at least you have Internet Explorer 5 for the Mac which was fairly recently patched to fix security issues/bugs, and feels familiar to most users. You also have the iCab browser which could be thrown on there as an alternate.

Might wanna use BumperCar...

[jeblucas (560748)]

You may want to use a "controlled" browser. Ie, one with "parental" protections built in so the teens don't go porning up the church atmosphere too much. You can even whitelist, which makes you work more, but you know they can't dodge it as easily as CyberSitter or that kind of thing. They can probably still get around it, but they'll have to work a little.

Check it out here [freeverse.com].

Which grape model?

[green pizza (159161)]

The tray-load CD (266 or 333 MHz, 66 MHz FSB, RagePro) or the slot-load CD (350+ MHz, 100 MHz FSB, Rage128) version? The slot-load models are **much** faster under OS X. If you have a tray-load version, you may want to consider running a flavor of Linux.

If you can, round up one or two sticks of RAM to upgrade the machine to 384 MB or more. If you're going with OS X, try to use 10.3.x, it's much faster than previous versions... not so important for a G4, but for a little G3-based iMac like you have, it will make a big difference.

Mac Kiosk

[thebra (707939)]

How to set up a Mac as a Kiosk [macosxlabs.org]. Very informative!

Consider donating an external drive too.

[BifurcatedFocus (579276)]

is there a way to prevent students from saving things on the hard drive (thus forcing them to use a diskette and/or the CD drive?)

Since the grape iMacs shipped with no disk drives and only a CD-ROM drive, if you want users to save to removable media, providing a drive that can actually write data would probably be a good idea.

Suggestions

[Chanc_Gorkon (94133)]

Setup your user (admin user) and a regular user. Allow them to save to the hard disk with a caveat....no files exist longer then one day. Write a script to clean out everything and restore things like standard Safari settings and the like (run Reset Safari to clean it up..not sure if this is scriptable). Put the script in the Admin User's crontab or root's crontab. For user saving files to disk, use a USB hub and have them use USB Drives for saving their items. Failing that, they could use CD-RW's.

DeepFreeze

[breakingthelantern (786241)]

DeepFreeze is a program that i use in my 2 windows lab, but their is a OS X version available. It freezes the partition to a point that you can delete the partion, and when the computer is restarted everything returns to the frozen image. I use to reimage with a boot disk, but this is so much easier. the site is http://www.faronics.com/html/DFMac.asp Thank you for supporting youth, so many people forget them.

Make it into a public kiosk.

[blanks (108019)]

Here you go.
http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/t n2062 .html

Large source of information, links software and more.

I would rather do it with a pc running Netstop, but hay, if your set on a mac, then theres no changing your mind.

Re:Windows..

[ejdmoo (193585)]

Also, group policy is a great way to lock down a system. You can make a machine very fool proof in terms of not screwing things up. For instance, you could have a profile, and every time you log off the system discards it and uses the default one again.

Re:Windows..

[torpor (458)]

You're clearly out of your mind. Windows? Teens? "Safe from Viruses".

Bwwwwaaaaahahahahahhahahahahahah!

Okay, sorry. OSX is a much, much, much safer environment for teens to be thrown loose into, than Windows.

I'm not even going to bother with the whole "Virus" thing ... no amount of Update Zone Alarm, New Updates or Anti Virus checking is going to prevent those teenagers from screwing the system.

Out of the box, you can set up an OSX account that deletes itself at the end of each session and renews the

Re:Windows..

[squiggleslash (241428)]

Macs are great for people who can use them

Yeah, it's a shame Apple makes them so hard to use...

Re:Flavor?

[LordBanshee (766398)]

It's common in the Mac community to give the "Flavor" instead of the full configuration. My guess is he wanted to give an estimation of the configuration involved, and that is good for me. for a Mac user "grape"= "iMac CRT 266 or 333, 6Mb VRAM, 6Gb HD, USB1, no Firewire", so yes I think "grape" is relevant information. On a grape iMac, you could run panther, and there is a "Simple Finder" equivalent on 10.3

Re:The 1st install should be:

[LighthouseJ (453757)]

Bart: Got him!
Rod: No, you just winged him and made him a Unitarian.

baaa mod down

[superultra (670002)]

If I had mod points I'd have used them negatively on your post instead of posting. Part of learning any operating system, or anything, is spending time it, poking around, and doing things you didn't know how to do. Another large part is asking questions from people who have the know-how, just like the OP did. Instead of sharing knowledge, which you presumably have, you decided to deconstruct his or her post.

I can't think of a better way to learn than learning while helping charity. If the OP was doin