Suitability question

[Da Rock]

On Thu, 2008-12-18 at 16:46 -0500, Glen Barber wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 4:25 PM, Patrick Baldwin
> <Patrick.Baldwin at studsvik.com> wrote:
> > Usually I'm asking questions for work related things.  This one is more
> > personal.
> > My father has this tendency to end up wrecking his computer if he uses the
> > Internet
> > much.  Computers are basically magic boxes to him, so education is of
> > limited usefulness
> > here.
> >
> 
> Are you willing to maintain the machine for him?
> 
> > I'm thinking I might be best of trying to built him a really locked-down,
> > high security
> > box, almost an Internet appliance.  All he really does is use the Web, and a
> > little
> > light word processing.
> >
> 
> Word processing won't be a problem, but internet 'toys' like Flash
> will be a problem, unless you use some wine+firefox workaround.
> 
> > What do people think of FreeBSD as the base OS for this idea?
> 
> I think the idea's good, as long as you are willing to fix it when if
> it breaks on him.

Maybe some minor support, but I think if you're going to this extent to
lock it down, install specific apps only, etc, then setting it up with
some auto scripts to clean things up and fix little errors you won't
need to do much at all. Overall a very good idea- something I will be
doing very soon too.