--- Alan Loughlin wrote:

My main question is what Linux distro shall I go for and what caching and filtering solution will do what isa and surfcontrol do?

I'd go with censornet, myself ...

I've looked at censornet, but was not impressed because of i.e. always asking for authentication.

Oh? You'd have to be more specific as to which parts are constantly requiring authentication. I'm sure it can be fixed.

Also, if I decide to move to Linux, how can you customise and lock down the desktop environment. We have decent pc's here, so a way to do this without ltsp would be handy.

"Lock down"? What do you mean by that? Hmm, let's see. There's no such thing as "the" desktop environemnt -- there's a whole plethora [1] of them. As to which one you get as standard (if at all) depends on which distribution you pick. Either way, you can bet your bottom penny that it'll be one of either KDE [2] or GNOME [3]. Customising either of those requires that you're able to use a mouse, essentially. As to making such changes non-persistent, you would have to ensure that for any dot-files and dot-directories within the $USER's $HOME are set to read-only. You'd also have to change the ownership of the file to something different as well. Since we don't know which distro nor which desktop manager you'll be using, specific information will be scetchy at best. Note that whilst it is entirely possible to get a desktop environment to read from a system-wide location (/etc/X11/*, for instance, as most DEs tend to) -- that wouldn't negate a user being able to then customise things in their $HOME directory -- so supplying a default set of files, and locking them out would still have to take place. For KDE this tends to be ~/.kde{,2} (as a directory) and for GNOME: ~/.gnome -- Thomas Adam [1] http://www.xwinman.org [2] http://www.kde.org [3] http://www.gnome.org "The Linux Weekend Mechanic" -- http://linuxgazette.net "TAG Editor" -- http://linuxgazette.net "<shrug> We'll just save up your sins, Thomas, and punish you for all of them at once when you get better. The experience will probably kill you. :)" -- Benjamin A. Okopnik (Linux Gazette Technical Editor) ___________________________________________________________ How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com