Grannybuntu

[Rev Simon Rumble]

Hi folks.

A retired family friend recently had the hard drive in her PC die.  
She's very much not computer literate and lives up in Lennox Head (I 
live in Sydney) so posting her components or anything like that just 
isn't an option.  I'd even be worried about her plugging a box into the 
wall, keyboard, mouse, monitor and phone line, though appropriate 
labelling might do the job.

Anyway, I have a couple of IBM Netstation thin clients floating around, 
which I'm thinking might be turned into an Internet access box for her.  
They're only P266 equivalents, but that should probably do.

The machines have a CF card slot and two PCI slots, so I'm thinking of 
setting one of these up with PCI modem and a Linux distro installed.  
All she really needs is Firefox and Floating Bubble (she loved playing 
that on my Mum's computer when she was visiting :) so I'd like to give 
her as stripped-down a distro as possible.  Four icons on the desktop 
would be ideal, dial, hang-up, Firefox, Frozen Bubble.

So what are people's thoughts on this?  Would I want to make the CF card 
read-only to stop her screwing anything up?  Is a P266 enough grunt to 
run modern Firefox and X?  Is there an install method for Ubuntu that 
allows me to install a really minimal desktop?

I also think I might set up another icon that opens an ssh tunnel for 
me, so I can login for remote access to do support over the phone.

-- 
Rev Simon Rumble <simon at rumble.net>
www.rumble.net

 "It is grossly irresponsible to connect a Windows machine directly to
  the net.  ;-)"
- John Wiltshire on the Sydney Linux User Group mailing list