Chris Bouwmeester wrote:

Hi. We have an application which at the moment runs on Adobe AIR/flash under windows. I'd like to explore the suitability of running it under Linux instead. The application is for preschoolers and we also need to make changes to the operating system to lock it down and prevent them getting out of the application, etc. Are you able to point me towards someone who can do/assist us with that sort of thing? Thanks, Chris.

The lockdown part can be achieved mostly by running the app full-screened in X, enabling DontZap (on by default these days), and disabling the gettys (or disabling Ctrl+Alt+Fn). Unless the app itself offers e.g. a shell, you should be fine. Preventing users from hijacking the boot sequence is harder -- you have to worry about getting access to the BIOS, the bootloader, the initrd (esp. recovery shell), plus anything you leave enabled in init. This is not particularly onerous iff you can get a custom BIOS compiled by your hardware vendor (if you have homogeneous hardware). Also you will need to worry about physical security, esp. access to jumpers and cables to disk &c off the mainboard. If you're just worried about a preschooler dropping to a shell by accident and rm -rf'ing the disk, you can probably forego my 2nd and 3rd paras -- it's more concerned with deliberate malice. I won't even bother to comment on the flash part -- I'm sure plenty of other people here will have articulate rants about that. Though, perhaps I should have started by asking: why do you want to switch from Windows?