Linux for mom?

I was home the other day, and like every techie that goes home for Christmas, I was enlisted to fix the family computer. “Its too slow — that kaleidoscope thingie keeps spinning” [can't you tell we have a Mac].

I took a look, and the issue isn’t really the computer itself so much as the 4+ years of application buildup slowing down the machine and a new version of OSX (upgraded to Tiger from I believe OS X 10.2) which undoubtedly eats up more cycles than 10.2.  If I spent a few hours uninstalling and cleaning, or worse, reformatting, I could definitely speed it up dramatically…but why?

What she and millions of other PCs sitting in dens, kitchens and family rooms around the world need is an extremely stripped down OS which would run only the barest of basics — in her case, it would be only Firefox, since she gets her emails though gmail. Conceivably, the 1% of other stuff that she does could be handled though another, more fully functioning computer.

What is needed here, and what I hope to build at some point given a bit more time to play around with the stuff, is a bare bones LiveCD that loads itself fully into memory and provides only a browser in an attractive and friendly format. I know there are distros like Damn Small Linux and others that begin down this road, but even those are too much for what I envision — a sort of set-top box for the internet. It needs to look decent (I installed a Ubuntu LiveCD and her first comment was ‘eww, whats that ugly brown color on my desktop’) and be completely free of other icon clutter — no dock, maybe a basic clock, no desktop icons, no media players, no email clients, etc. Finally, the icing on the cake would be this — you plug in a flash drive, and that becomes your home directory. Again, this is something other distro’s have attempted, but none have perfected (that I know). The way this would work is as follows: plug in the flash drive, boot up linux. On the first boot, if the flash drive isn’t formatted as ext3, give the option to format (this is dangerous because you would have to be sure its not a hard drive with Windows and data on it, but that can be surmounted). On subsequent boots, the /home/username structure would exist, and all Firefox settings and preferences would be saved to the flash drive.

The best thing about this would be that the volatile aspect of the OS would mean that a fresh, fast computer is never further than a reboot away. If the window manager was something very lightweight (XFCE, etc…or even Ratpoison started up with Firefox maximized…hmmmmm), it could run very well on even the oldest of hardware. People that don’t use computers often wouldn’t have to worry about breaking the system, kids could use it without corrupting anyone’s data (since everything would be on a flash drive anyways) and geeks like me could enjoy Thanksgiving without having to perform a brain transplant on an aging iMac.

Interested to hear if anyone has made more progress on this than I’ve seen…