[belladonna]

Hi I'm giving my son some space here to write his Q's - though I don't know what he's on about, I do hope someone will ......

Hi, I'm 13 and moderately experienced on computers (I have installed several flavours of Linux on my laptop, an Advent 6411) and I play around with them as often as possible.
I am attempting to run (Linux) Ubuntu 5.04 on a PC (I can't find the model of the PC, although it says Medion(r) Computer on the front of the case) - not 5.10 as I have found that one to be unstable when I have attempted to install it.
I am configuring it so it can be used by several teenagers, in a youth club setting. I have created a username, and set the privileges so they can only access the cdrom drives, etc, and so they can't access admin programs, such as synaptic package manager or apt-get. But how do I stop them using right click, to change their background or opening screensaver preferences or adding shortcuts to the bars along the top and bottom of the screen, or using terminal? On the last computer they had, they removed the original config settings and removed true colour, high colour, 256 colour, and all resolutions excluding 640x480, leaving the PC with 16bit colour and DVD playback impossible. So I want to make the restrictions as tight as possible, so it doesn't happen again.
Also, I would like to know how to give the computer DVD playback capability. I followed the instructions on Ubuntu 5.04 unofficial guide, but it didn't work. I added loads of extra repositories to Synaptic Package Manager, got hold of Xine, XMMS, Mplayer, Okle and several others. They all refused to play them - Xine (and Totem, apparently also able to DVDs) said the format was wrong (I have set the region settings and the drive to read from) Okle shutting down, XMMS freezing, and Mplayer simply said no - it couldn't read it.
Games seem to be a big problem too: I can install lots - but when I restart the PC the next day, they are either gone or the system crashes. Games are one of the main reasons they will want to use it.
And how do I make Wine work properly?
Thanks, Fazzy.

P.S. which distro does SusE come under?

[tsunam]

as far as dvd playback, make sure you have libdvdcss installed. This will allow you to read the encrypted dvd's and play them back, that's most likely the problem with playing the dvd's in any player currently. As they are part of the cdrom group, there shouldn't be a issue with permission on the cdrom drive.

As far as locking it down so that you can't change settings..there's a couple of ways to do it. The easiest would be to just reset the accounts after they log out. You can do that via the administration of user accounts with gnome (appears that that is what you are using, if i remember ubuntu's default)

Wine is pain in the butt to setup and get working with the games you want. I honestly vote against installing it and working with it.