[wplug] Lightweight Linux Kiosk

[Eric Cooper]

On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 01:02:21PM -0400, Martin James Gehrke wrote:
> I am trying to resurrect one of the old laptops I have for my kids to play
> pbskids games.
> 
> The laptop definitely isn't new but it is respectable.
> 
> Dell Inpsiron e1405
> Core 2 Duo T5600 @ 1.83GHz
> 1GB of RAM (can go to 4 but I'd rather not spend money on a ancient laptop)
> 
> Besides the usual wireless snafu, the thing is just dog slow. It crawls
> when doing more than a single application. The graphics are slow. I could
> put on a different display manager.
> 
> Thoughts?

I just tried running one PBS Kids game in Chromium on my desktop;
it used about 500M of memory and almost 50% of the CPU, so it's not
surprising that two of them bring your machine to its knees.  Modern web
applications in general create huge pressure on memory, so I think
your best bet would be to avoid browser-based games and install some
local ones (see https://wiki.debian.org/Kids/Packages for some
examples).  Hope this helps.

-- 
Eric Cooper             e c c @ c m u . e d u