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I have installed 10 Ubuntu 13.10 in a Cybercafe for daily about 300 users to use the PC, but its a nightmare with Ubuntu cause people just use Internet and make the system hell.

How can I deep freeze it? On reboot it go back to yesterday always? So that it works like one day use but always goes back to my first installation on each reboot?

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5 Answers 5

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AuFS can solve this problem for you. Here is an example of people merging the filesystem with a RAM disk so changes go away on reboot.

If you don't have much memory, you could do the same using a loopback file or partition to store the changes, and re-format the loopback file/partition once a day.

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  1. Ensure that each machine has one account, an admin account with a fairly strong password. Do not give this password to users.
  2. Log in as the admin and enable guest login, it should be under the user settings in system preferences. Then log out.
  3. When users arrive, they can login as 'guest' without a password, and use the computer as if they had an account.
  4. When they log out, all the changes they made are erased. No reboots required!
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  • How do you make a username: Aaron and install Skype, OpenOffice, Google Chrome and then let users login to Aaron always but never lost the preinstallation?
    – user25165
    Feb 25, 2014 at 18:11
  • You can log in as the admin and install whatever software you want. When the users log in as guest they will have access to this software. Jul 17, 2015 at 9:58
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Just use Guest Sessions and autologin.

sudo gedit /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

And change this:

autologin-guest=false

To this:

autologin-guest=true
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Why not format a little hard disk (or SSD) as a Live USB and boot from it ?

See: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-ubuntu

and select your little hard disk as "Disk to use".

With a SSD you could even consider rebooting for every new user.

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fsprotect is a set of scripts that protect existing filesystems. fsprotect is excellent for public computers like those in libraries, internet cafés, etc.

Using aufs they pack a tmpfs filesystem forcing changes to be written to the tmpfs filesystem.

The root filesystem is protected by an initramfs script. Other filesystems are protected by an init script. All protected filesystems become read-only ensuring their immutability even on power-offs.

To install fsprotect in all currently supported versions of Ubuntu open the terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install fsprotect

The benefits of using fsprotect are:

  • Filesystems are protected and no change is ever written to the disk.
  • Protected filesystems are mounted read-only. This means that they aren't damaged when the computer is turned off improperly.
  • It is very easy to use.
  • In some cases it makes the filesystem access faster.

The drawbacks of using fsprotect are:

  • Filesystem changes cannot be more than a predefined limit in bytes (set by you).
  • Since tmpfs is heavily used, you need to have adequate swap space.

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