Giving Knoppix & derivatives to minors

[pterandon]

I'm considering teaching a class on open-source computer graphics at my church to 10-20 yr olds or in the local high school night program.

I've played with Knoppix for over 14 months now and I myself know how not to wreck the underlying installation; I am wondering if one were intent on doing something stupid, one could find a way. I just have fears of giving a knoppix (or Mediainlinux, 'cuz they got povray :P ) CD to an 11-year old, and he finds a way to reformat his father's work laptop. I wouldn't hesitate to give to 18 year olds, but younger kids might go nuts.

Two questions:
1) Is there a way to minimize the risk of such events by choosing a particular distro (like, is Gnome less risky in this regard??) or some other means?

2) Is there a common articulation of the risk available somewhere such that I could give to parents with a CD?

Thanks.

[Harry Kuhman]

Most Live CD distros wil include some tools to partition disks like fdisk, so I doubt that you could find a "safe" distro without remastering your own wth the tools that you want on it.

But there seems to be a basic conflict in what you want to do. Most systems that your kids would use such CDs on will tend to be WinXP systems with all of the hard disk space taken up by NTFS partitions that you can't write to with Linux. Floppies will be too small to hold most output from graphic programs like POV. So unless you plan on everyone using falsh drives to hold their data you will have no good way to heve the students save their work. I would think you might be a lot better of to pick open source programs that your students can use under XP (POV fits this need nicely). That way the few parents who do pratice safe computing can be advised to install the software and only give the children user access to their own space and not administrator access, although it is far more likely that the kids are administrating the systems and the adults have less insight on the workings of the computer than the kids.