The Zonbu team sent me two extra units (in addition to the one I bought) to use around the office. One has proven to be a robust kiosk PC in our office lobby. We have a few thousand people a month come through to pay bills, report faults or sign up for new service. Many stop and use the web and the system has performed admirably in this role.
We are not using “Kiosk mode”, instead choosing to leave it “as is” for now. We haven’t had any nefarious problems yet.
The other unit I gave to our online editor. A Macbook user, and non-techie, I basically dropped it on her desk, booted it up and showed her how to login then walked away. She’s been using it for weeks to edit images with Gimp, surf the web with Firefox, and do other basic office functions with the included application stack. She’s had virtually no problems, save for a small bug with open folders in the file manager not closing properly. I’m quite impressed, to be honest.
Next up is connecting to shares in the office on our Windows based server, which I will report back on, as well as trying our some printer support.
One thing that did come up is the lack of fonts configured in Gimp, which I’ve raised before, as well as the fact that a new version of Gimp is iminent. It will be interesting to see how fast the final release of Gimp 2.4 gets pushed out to the Zonbu populace.
You can read more about Gimp 2.4 here: http://www.gimp.org/
-Mr. Zonbu
Real life with the Zonbu Mini-PC 