2011/5/22 Prasanna Venkadesh <[email protected]>

> Hi all,
>
> My friend is running an Internet Center. When i visited there it was fully
> Windows Systems inside.
>

You can have some popular Linux distro inside. Something like Linux mint or
Ubuntu. (For the eye candy). Your friend has to decide if he wants to give
the users a full desktop or a kiosk. A kiosk is a restricted desktop like an
ATM where users have access to a limited number of applications and limited
access to applications.

If he needs a kiosk, you can build a kiosk out of scratch or you can use
some sophisticated suite like OpenKiosk:
http://openkiosk.sourceforge.net/index.html ( Thanks Gaurav Paliwal ).

He has got a single High speed internet connection and he shares it to all
> the systems in the center via a single system.
>

As a measure of security, you can have a good firewall, parental control
system, etc at the end node. I would recommend that you try Untangled for
this. If your friend has the resource, Untangled can run as a separate node.
Or he can run it in VirtualBox. Other standard security tools apply. Like
iptables, ( also checkout the Ubuntu package iptables-persistent ) etc.

He was complaining about Viruses because of Users downloading lot of
> malicious contents.
>

There won't be too much of a Virus problem but if there is some Windows
machine connected to the network, you can protect it by using ClamAV at the
machine or you can add ClamAV to Untangle itself.


> So i preferred him to change all the systems to Linux (Ubuntu).
>
> If so to set up such an internet center using Ubuntu, what are tools will
> be
> required to share internet connection, ( i heard people talking about
> Squid,
> but dont know much of it).
>

Squid is a proxy server, you can have polipo which is a light weight proxy
server (Apache:LigHTTPD = Squid:Polipo). Very simple yet effective.

Can you list the essential tools to be needed ?
>

It's essential that mp3 and other restricted formats of audio and video work
at the nodes. Install all restricted and proprietary codecs. (Free software
enthusiasts, appologise).

On the desktop, make sure you have icons for Libreoffice, GIMP, Chromium
Browser, VLC media Player, Firefox, games like 0ad, open-arena, sudoku,
mahjong, celestia, etc.

Install macslow's cairo clock and docky and a cool wallpaper for eye candy.
If you have scanner, install Xsane. Printer sharing has to be set up
carefully.

Some people may have questions. Make sure you have a sheet of paper with
info and (if possible) a copy of Ubuntu ready for them. :)

--
Yogesh G
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