Child-safe project advice

[ParentalUnit]

I've been thinking of building an inexpensive box that allows my (smart, sweet, but not too concerned with
the consequences of borking my system) preteen daughter to do email, surfing and homework, limits the
amount of mischief she can do, and is extremely easy to fix when she does bork it.
Here's what I have so far:
Build a box with:
- 2G of RAM
- a decent video card ~ Geforce2 MX or better
- a solid sound card ~SB Live! or better
- ethernet card (Tulip-ish)
- DVD player
- CDROM (for Knoppix disk)
- CD RW (for Knoppix home and email and homework)
- *NO* HD
Use a custom Knoppix Live CD with preconfigured
- KDE
- OOo
- Dan's Guardian
and run the whole shebang toram.
I could use your help/suggestions for selection of
- an older motherboard/CPU that supports the software and USB
- customization of the aforementioned roll-your-own
What else should I include?
What should I leave out?
Do you have any other helpful suggestions for the project?

Thank you,
-ParentalUnit

[OErjan]

with chance of seeming stupid.
why not a dvd+rw mounted as ext2?
it will require dvd+rwtools and so but... it is virtually a hdd as far as linux is concerned. if you are going to customize you might as well pop that in and add in the fstab.
hmm, might work with cdrw aswell... hmmmm, oh well.
here is the link to the programme anyway.
http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW
i wil think some more on it...
EDIT cone to think on it. my motherboard has a intergrated nic that works in knoppix, and a integrated soundcard aswell (not great just an AC97 but...) it is an ASRock K7S8X and i think rev3 (not 100%) cost all of 85€
here is a link to a review on it
http://www.ocworkbench.com/2003/asrock/k7s8x/k7s8x-1.htm /EDIT
hope to help OErjan

[aay]

I would not run this in ram. What if the power fluctuates or you need to reboot for whatever reason? You would do much better just to install it or set it up as a thin/fat client to a terminal server box. You could run the Knoppix terminal server, but it's not too easy to get this to run from an install. If you want to the the server thing, then you might want to try out something like Skole Linux http://www.skolelinux.org/portal/

[garyng]

How about get a powerful enough machine as an VNC server and get some cheap notebook on ebay and run VNC viewer ? There are lots of such good stuff on ebay that cost as little as 50-80 US a pop. This is even cheaper than a CRT monitor sometimes.

[ParentalUnit]

Thank you for the thin client suggestions.
I considered them. Power is not a problem - The house is filtered and all boxes are on UPS backup.
I want her to have her "own" computer and I want her to learn first-hand the consequences of borking
her system and losing data. I thought a CD-based solution that ran fast - Lotsa RAM, CD-RW for storage
and no HD - was an ideal way to do this.
Forgot to tell you this:
I want her to be able to learn how to upgrade a system, so notebooks and separate servers are not
really suitable platforms.

[OErjan]

in that case a dvd+rw would be great, you can fit knoppix on that and still have room:-) otoh i do not know if it can be run on that as a hddinstall. it might. hmmmm.
if you do the "poormans install (that is put the knoppix.iso on the dvd) and boot from a floppy it might work.
and if then the making of a persistent /home on the dvd works you have a semi-permanent solution.
it would just cost a few € to replace the whole disk (if it crashes). and it could be blanked a few times (iirc 12 full formats).
she would still have some 3Gb to save things to...

aaarrrgghhh, thoughts running in circles.
i MUST try. have to wait till i get this months paycheck though, i have no internal dvdburner, have a firewire/usb2 external. would require a boot os on hdd to get THAT going. hmmm. must try, frustrating to have to give blind advise.

aaaarrrrgggghhh.
could someone please try and report?. i am getting frustrated here.