I recently built a computer for a salon with 15 hairstylist who all needed an Internet kiosk to check their email, and schedule appointments. I decided that a simple and cheep solutions would be what we in the industry call “The $30 computer” (or free if you know the right people). Here at iDotMind, we happen to have a few of those old cruddy computers that used to run Microsoft Windows 98, that most people consider completely worthless.
I gave this computer “new life” by installing the super friendly, but lightweight version of Linux called Debian which runs pretty well on your 433MHz machine. This computer would be good for any coffee house, library, school or public computer lab, or in this case a business where many employees could share one workstation. Because this computers main and only task is to run a web browser or be an Internet surfing station, it wouldn’t require a very good computer at all.
My first step was to install Debian Linux which you can get for free from http://www.debian.org/CD/
After I finished installing the Debian Operating System with the Gnome Desktop (tweaking it out with my own background and theme), and making a generic user account with no user options. I had to write a shell script to refresh the system daily back to its original install state. So to the terminal we go.
To do this I had to make a backup of my user home directory.
cp -R /home/user /root/user_bk
Then I had to write a very short shell script that would replace the user_bk (my backed up user home directory) as the user home directory daily to overwrite any changes made on the default user account.
I am going to put this script in my root directory
nano /root/home.sh
Note: I am calling my script home.sh
#!/bin/sh
HOME=/root
LOGNAME=0
PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
SHELL=/bin/bash
rm -rf /home/user
cp -Ra /root/user_bk /home/user
chown -R user:user /home/user
reboot
Then I would need to set up a cron job to run this script daily at 7AM
crontab -e
# m h dom mon dow command
0 7 * * * /bin/bash /root/home.sh
There we go, I now have a self healing computer, or your “Public Toilet Computer” that erases what crap the public leaves on it automatically at 7AM every morning then reboots to refresh the very limited RAM, fresh for a new day of public usage. If only toilets would clean themselves too.
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Written By Dan Walk
Computer Scientist
http://www.iDotMind.com
This article be freely shared non-commercially under the Creative Commons
Public Use Debian Computer How to by iDotMind is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
