--- Alan Loughlin <loughlina@swalcliffepark.co.uk> wrote:

respond in a informative way. How does these comments like this help me? They don’t.

I disagree. As I said to you, for whichever distro you pick (see below), you will most likely be given KDE or GNOME -- my advice to you about locking files down is crude at best, but it is certainly an option open to you. I know KDE offers a kiosk option - so that you can specify certain applications that can be run, etc. When you said "customisation" I took that to mean aesthetics. If this is not the case, you'll have to clarify. If you go with KDE for kiosk (and it perhaps would seem a stronger candidate than GNOME, as GNOME is lacking in such a feature) then everything is more or less ready to go. I have used it, and it is easy to configure. Can you come up with more information as to the sorts of things you'd want to restrict? Are you wanting users to only run certain applications (again, a kiosk)? Or would you rather have some auditing means as to the programs a user has been running? To an extent, you can restrict users running binary programs from $HOME, by mounting /home with "noexec" set as an option in /etc/fstab -- the presupposition here is that /home is on its own partition -- a scheme I'd recommend you employ. You can probably also do some clever things with PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module) to restrict users. I know that on Debian and RedHat (Fedora) that you can set limits for things in /etc/security/limits.conf - but this is usually for superficial attributes of a running process.

This was my main question, im asking for distro opinions based on everyone's personal experience, I don't know what distro to choose, that’s one reason why im posting.

Ok, below is my own personal summary of distros, with their appropriate merits. One thing I will say before I launch into that is that there is no real difference between distros anymore. Not like there used to be. The difference lies with the concept of package management. Also, with work done by the FSH (File System Hierarchy) and LSB (Linux System Base) - all distros that support them will follow agreed locations of files, so this has made things easier. As you can probably guess, this never used to be the case, and RedHat used to define a lot of this for itself. :) Distros tend to work from two primary package management file models. One is the use of RPMs, and the other are .DEBs (although this is used only on a specific distribution). RPMs (RedHat Package Manager) are the oldest format, but the most widely used for distros such as "SuSE", "Fedora" and "Mandriva" (I still call them Mandrake). Debian is a special case in that it defined for itself its own format of file to distribute packages under [1]. Why you'd use one distro over another depends on your situation. I've already mentioned CensorNet, which you've tried. They all offer much of a muchness, to be honest - SuSE for instance offers a nice frontend called YaST (Yet Another Setup Tool) from which you can install new packages, and configure parts of the system. SuSE is really good for a novice as it gets things setup quickly from which one can learn from, without fear of breaking much as YaST can usually out it right again. I really can't remember which desktop environment it comes with as the de facto, I have a feeling it is KDE, although doubtless someone can correct me on this. SuSE also boasts a large collection of packaged RPMs, and this is indeed true. Even SuSE 6.4 had a large set of packaged applications. Fedora -- hmm, very much like SuSE. It uses the same package manager but doesn't offer such a nice centralised system akin to SuSE's YaST from what I know of it. So this might be a limitation in some situations in using a text-editor. If it's something that's not appealing, I'd probably avoid it. Fedora probably comes with GNOME (GNOME is GNU's flagship desktop environment, after all), but as with any distro, changing between desktop environments is generally a trivial thing to do. The package manager, although using RPM, as a front-end uses YUM which combines apt-get's dependency resolution (taken from the Debian distro) with RPMs (some say this is the best of both worlds, I disagree. :)) Mandrake/Mandriva -- only recently changed its name, it's very very similar to RedHat 7, before RH turned into Fedora for its community-lead distro. It offers DrakeX, which is sort of similar to the idea of YaSt -- a centralised system to do other tasks, besides package management. I did hear rumours of them looking to charge for updates (a "nominal" fee, if you will) -- but I am assuming this fell through. As with Fedoram and SuSE, it is RPM-based. Slackware -- this has no package manager, the standard form of distributed "packages" being as gzipped tarballs (.tgz files). This distro is perhaps the oldest distro still going, and still maintained by the same person. I'd avoid it, mind -- unless you know Linux inside out, of course. Debian -- my preferred distro, although I've tried many. It's a middle ground between being newbie friendly, whilst allowing those more experienced to get on with things. It has a different "user model" than the other distros mentioned. For instance, debian doesn't install with a "standard" desktop environment -- the choice is left upto the user as to what he/she wants. That said, there are pre-arranged "selections" of commmon packages suited to a specific environment (much like YaST offers via 'profiles' at installation time). I would probably not suggest this distro as one's first choice, even though I'm tempted to (but biased). There are others out there - a whole host of live-CD distros (these tend to be 'based' on Debian) as well as other more established distros that I just haven't covered here.

I appreciate that your response didn't just include snidey comments, but I will not accept people speaking to me in this way.

I'm sorry you read my reply as an attack upon yourself. Not my intention, I assure you. I answer a lot of questions on different lists -- I've found that the more specific you can be when asking a question, the more precise answer you'll get. HTH, -- Thomas Adam [1] They're actually just ar(1) files with metadata encapsulating them. ___________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Messenger - want a free and easy way to contact your friends online? http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com