OK, there've been a number of threads anent various *nix distros. In fact, I think one (1) of 'em was where I learned about Zorin.
But what I need at the moment is a bit of guidance. What I'm considering is installing Zorin (or maybe a better distro for the purpose?) on a USB stick. This will be used on various machines, a couple of which do not have functional CD/DVD drives. Rationale for this procedure is that others, mostly XP or Win7 users, will be driving the machine(s) most of the time. My readings indicate that Zorin is likely the most Win-like OS, but I've misread before.
So the question is whether this would be a viable approach, and, if so, what's the best way to accomplish this. Is there a particular USB boot loader that surpasseth all others?
If memory serves, all the machines in question are USB bootable, so that shouldn't be an issue
. However the bootloaders for USB that I've seen mention of are widely variant, and I'd prefer not to spend the next six (6) months discovering which would work best for this situation, if I can avoid that
.
Reason for using a distro is that a friend of mine has, or created, a program that will track activity - not quite a key-logger, but pretty close - which should let me analyze activity over a period of time in order to discover bottlenecks, hardware issues, and the like. Unfortunately, it will not run on the MS platform, nor on OSX.
Open/Libre Office and email are the primary usages involved, so that should not be a problem, or at least not a significant problem. If they want video/audio, they're on their own, although there a a number of *nix applications available for such activity. I'll prolly install some of them, given the USB stick is large enough.
Sticks I have available are 1G, 4G, 8G, 16G, 32G, 64G, so those will dictate what can be added to the basic loading. (Just once, I'd love to see a stick that is 25G, 50G, or the like ... I'm accustomed to thinkin' in decimal, not binary
.)
So, any suggestions? Anyone?