Quote Originally Posted by crono_logical View Post
- almost certainly Gentoo, if only because I'm more familiar with it than Ubuntu, and for the customisation aspects of it. I'll probably clone the disk from one machine once ready onto the rest or something to avoid multiple compilation/reconfiguration.
Gentoo would be my choice, but obviously maintenance or upgrading is a bit of an issue. If you run a totally stable box then you should be fine, though from my experience, a reinstall is better than an emerge world. If for some reason you decide not to cron a re-imaging of the disks you could consider running a portage server and have it serve binary packages. Then you could write a script to reset everything and cron it for each night.

[q]- Firefox/Thunderbird/OpenOffice, maybe Gaim and some IRC software too, and any small games bundled with KDE/Gnome or whatever [/q]
What about writing a script to change the DE or WM? By default, Knoppix (among other distros) has a cascading WM menu which allows you to switch between managers.You could get a few opensourced games as well; stuff like Enemy Territory, Quake 3 and UT.

[q]- need to think about flash/pdf support[/q]
Flash has trouble with 64 bit so it refuses to install. You can modify the installer to install it anyway, but that caused sound issues with me (flash would kill sound for every other app until reboot). In my experience Xpdf and its backends (I used kpdf) mostly work well, but don't cope with some slides. Don't ask me why that is because I have no idea but they rendered some slides abysmally. Adobe Reader works fine and is now what I use. It's probably a better choice for an internet cafe, since most of your customers will be Windows users.

[q]- MacOS-like docking bar at the bottom to put the browser/email/IM/Office stuff on, and with simple names [/q]
I haven't found anything that I like enough to keep using, but the best one undoubtedly is the nicely composited Avant Window Navigator. Unfortunately the only version to install is the SVN version so it's not always stable. It's also very early in its development. There're others like kiba-dock (nice idea, but too intrusive, and causes Compiz-Fusion/XGL/AIGLX/Beryl to suffer very badly from the nVidia GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap), kxdocker or ksmoothdock (both really, really unstable) or using the starterbar from GDesklets (couldn't get it to work with compositing and it's not a docker, only a launcher). Those are what I've tried, but I'm sure there are more.

[q]- Compiz-fusion for other useful eyecandy but not the distracting stuff, if the hardware supports [/q]
Compiz-Fusion is really stable for me so far. Much moreso than Beryl, AIGLX or XGL was. If you do put it on there, you should include instructions on how to use the features - maybe put a list into the desktop background or something.

[q]- some way to reset user settings to a known state. Not decided on whether to use a chroot, some way to copy partitions/directory trees over on bootup and wipe temp folders, or a mixture or anything else.[/q]
I would chroot personally. It gives a totally safe sandbox to play around in and even if they screwed up while in their session, it's only a chroot so nothing is actually harmed. You'll have to make sure that the chroot is always into the same kernel that was booted though.
The Debian boxes at my university are re-imaged from scratch every night.

[q]- dunno whether to have a separate box running squid to proxy web traffic through, so can do Adblock-type filtering as well like I do on my home network already, without needing local plugins which users can disable. If we go with this separate box, then diskless machines/netboot might be an idea too, but that's not something I've toyed with much before on linux I guess it could also serve as a remote admin point or even a full firewall and NAT all traffic through it.[/q]
The Debian boxes at my uni also netboot. It seems like a good idea but I don't know much about it, sorry.