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."

Re:A great act of kindness!

[lpangelrob2]

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!

[XryanX]

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 willing to hear their reasoning. I know that I quit using the computers in high school when they locked the resolution at 800x600.

Might wanna use BumperCar...

[jeblucas]

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].

Mac Kiosk

[thebra]

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

You think that's funny, but...

[Scott Richter]

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]

Re:Apple does it...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

That's pretty impressive in and of itself, but did you know that daily image (as well as all the tunes over the speakers during the day) come directly from Cupertino, rather than some CD in back?

Nice little networking rack in back.

Locked down setup:

[Anonymous Coward]

I helped set up a number of iMacs in a Bio lab. Here is what we did: Set up an account so that it auto logs in. Set up this account with the simple finder and then in there you can specify which programs they can use, what directories they can access. Then set up these most used programs in the dock. We also set up a professor's account which is pretty much a standard Mac OS X user and an admin account for the lab manager.
Finally put the open firmware password in since we had some people who were booting on CD's and then fooling with the system.

We also had to lock down things in Classic since their major program in use was run under Classic. In your situation this probably won't be the case so things are MUCH simpler.

--jim

Re:One Word: DriveShield

[Dravik]

If a kid saves important stuff, wouldn't that be called a learning oportunity?

Safari-IE icons?

[Chris_Willman]

Silly idea, but possibly one that might save you a phone call or two.
Change the "Safari" icon (or whatever browser you're planning to use-NOT IE) to the Internet Explorer icon, and possibly rename the browser to "Internet Explorer." (Of course, delete the original IE.)
Chances are, most kids are used to IE on a Windows machine; when they see "safari," they'll have NO idea how to use it/what it is/blahblah without help from the person in charge. I know I've let all of my family (who use Windows) borrow my iBook, and they had no idea how to open the internet browser. As long as kids see an address bar, they know what to do from there.
Icons can be changed by selecting an app, right-clicking, going into "Get Info," then clicking on the smaller icon and copying. Following that, open "Get Info" on the other app which has the icon you're changing, click on the smaller icon, and paste.

Re:A great act of kindness!

[mirror_dude]

Why not let them push the rules?
I prefer the setup that my school has, every time the computer reboots it re-images and the students have full access to the machine. This allows for people like me to do interesting things (like install vnc, putty, etc.) and with a simple reboot everything goes back to normal.