On Fri, Nov 04, 2005 at 11:12:28AM -0500, Nick Cummings wrote: > Is anyone aware of a good (preferably easy to setup and manage) distro for > what I want that will work on that sort of hardware?
I'd recommend taking a look at OpenBSD (whose latest release, 3.8, just came out). It's really easy to install; it's about as secure-out-of-the-box as you're going to find; it runs well on minimal hardware; and it has enough precompiled packages available that you can probably avoid the need to build anything from source. The icewm (ICE Window Manager) is one of those packages, and is a simple/usable/lightweight window manager that is probably just fine for your intended use. (I gather that the user is probably just going to run an xterm and use "ssh -X <somewhere else>" most of the time.) See http://www.openbsd.org/plat.html for supported platforms. See http://www.openbsd.org/papers/auug04/ for a presentation on some of the security-related advances in OpenBSD. Which, also, BTW, has a rather advanced firewall ("pf") built-in.
