Linux is great to use at home. It can be handy at work. It's a great server operating system. But there's one other place that Linux is really worth its weight in gold: public, or semi-public, computers. There's nothing quite as nerve-wracking as seeing someone on a computer you're responsible for, and wondering what exactly they're up to. Except for maybe seeing someone you're responsible for on a computer, and wondering the same thing.

Public computers are pretty easy to visualize -- in places like internet cafés, libraries, or school computer labs. Semi-public computers are a little more obscure. Semi-public users can be any group from the temp workers in your office to your house guests or kids. The real function you'd want in any of these settings is control of some sort. You want the computer to stay in the condition it was in originally, at least as far as software goes. You might not want the users to have access to certain applications, or maybe they should access the internet through a proxy.

There are a number of ways to achieve this sort of set up. Before you shake your head and start wondering how exactly you're supposed to change login and desktop scripts... Relax. KDE's Kiosk is a pretty simple way to lock down a desktop.

Right now, it appears that Kiosk is still being ported to the KDE4 framework, so you'll have to stick with an older version of KDE for locked down desktops. Since most distros that feature a KDE4 desktop tend to still include KDE 3.5.x alongside it, this shouldn't be an issue.