#Linux friends. I am hoping someone can point me to a good primer on setting up a Linux machine for public use, without the need to create user accounts for each user.
There is a local organization that serves unhoused people in my community, and they have no computers or Wifi available for the public to use, so I'd like to donate older machines to them and provide administrative support.
I typically use Linux Mint Cinnamon and Linux Mint Debian Edition, but what's the best way to do this?
If I understand correctly, typically the challenge associated w/ setting up computers for public is all about Data privacy, making sure that everything is wiped after the person stops using the computer.
Is that what you are concerned with?
There is an operating system called Tails, (The amnesic incognito live system) which is privacy centric and already does this stuff by default. However, tails won't prevent users from administering the computer, for example, installing a different operating system on it or breaking it in a way where you would have to re-image it.
But maybe you don't have to worry about that until people who are very technical start coming into this space and messing with the computers, which may never even happen. Tails on its own could probably prevent accidental data exposure and that could provide a lot of value to begin with since it works out of the box.
I think the best way to do this would be with virtual machines. There probably is already a thing built to make this somewhat easy to set up, but I don't know what it's called and I don't know if it would be applicable to your use case.
But basically, you would separate the operating system on the computer into two categories, the host and the guest. The host would be locked down and only you the admin would be able to log into it. Then when a person who wants to use the internet comes in and turns the computer on, they have to follow instructions to enter into a secondary mode. Like maybe they just log in as a user called guest with the password guest. Then the login script for the guest user will run and it will automatically start up a new virtual machine.
Now they won't be able to modify anything on the host that would cause maintenance issues.
When they shut down that machine all the data inside will be lost.
And if there are some programs that your users frequently want to use, and they're always downloading them every time before they can start their work, then you could preload all that software onto the image that the virtual machine spawns from to streamline things.
@gcvsa I'm not sure what kind of solutions you are looking for, but... If you're interested in the more fancy option, I would maybe start by looking into Libvirt and Virt-manager.
This may vary depending on the hardware that you're using, but I know that the gaming community has come up with lots of ways to run virtual machines on Linux hosts at full speed so that they aren't slowed by virtual frame buffers and what not. I think its called GPU passthrough ?
