I’ve been conversing with Gregoire at Zonbu.
He agreed to send me a test unit to put in our lobby.
The unit is replacing a Windows XP machine that we had mildly locked down and that was used for public Internet access by random customers who pass through the lobby.
The timing is excellent, the machine arrived today and we had it installed and operational in minutes.
This includes the fact that the machine uses Wi-Fi for connectivity…
Why Fi?
We connected the Belkin Wi-Fi dongle before boot-up and sure enough it happily (and in plain English) prompted us to select the network, DHCP’d and got an IP address.
We didn’t have to do ANYTHING technical. Which is nice. Wi-Fi can be a pain in the butt.
We logged in to the test account, up came the desktop and we were off and running.
Downsizing…
I immediately adjusted down the taskbar, icon and font sizes to small.
They looked comically clown-sized at medium on the 15″ LCD we have in the lobby. I really think the default should be small.
We fired up Firefox, set the default page to a major news portal and now we’ll wait and see.
I also noticed my ball mouse is sticky so we’re going to find an IR mouse and replace it.
Traffic
There should be lots of traffic by the machine, over the next week, as it is bill payment time and thousands of people will be through the lobby to pay.
Many of them, or their kids/companions will use the machine during that time.
I’ll keep you posted on what we observe. It should be interesting to see if anyone really notices that it’s not Windows.
-Mr. Zonbu
Real life with the Zonbu Mini-PC 
Hmmm – a wireless mouse in the lobby? To take away? Like the WiFi dongle?
I don’t know about your lobby and visitors, but I guess in public places these things would be gone within minutes – if not the whole machine.
Cheers,
wjl
You raise a good point.
We actually have a security guard, although like most, he’s not always where he needs to be.
I’m not concerned about the whole device walking away, but I am concerned about someone swipiing the 4GB CF card.
I talked to my guys about it, and we think “out of sight, out of mind”.
The unit is on a shelf under the desk, tucked to the back. I don’t think it will get swiped, but I guess that is part of the experiment.
I don’t think the unit has a keystone port, which I noticed the MacMini does. If it did, I guess we could loop lock it to the desk. Wouldn’t save the CF card, but it would be a start…
-Mr. Zonbu
I seriously doubt the general public would know about the CF card, it’s not like it’s standard on computers. Then again, people do crazy things to get stuff for free. Definitely get a wired mouse though, using a wireless one is pretty risky if you ask me.