Hello everyone.
The organization I’m working is migrating some machines (public access) from windows to linux. These machines are low specs machines (1.5 GHz, 512 Ram) and only need basic software like office suite (libre office), browser (firefox) and image editing (gimp?). The idea is to clean all data used by the user every time the computer is restarted. Any thoughts on how to archive this?
We also would like to create an update server machine where we would put the updates we want to distribute to machines and configure machines to search for updates only on that server and not on the internet. Is this possible? Where can I find information on how to configure this scenario? Will the public machine update even if the logged user doesn’t have administrations rights?
I think that any distribution can be used for the client machines, but any suggestions are welcome.
Thank you all.

If I remember correctly, Ubuntu 10.4 LTS has a guest session feature that wipes user data at the end of the session and it should run OK with your hardware specs.

"We also would like to create an update server machine where we would put the updates we want to distribute to machines and configure machines to search for updates only on that server and not on the internet. Is this possible?"

- sure, see apt-cacher

"Will the public machine update even if the logged user doesn’t have administrations rights?"

- if you configure it to update automatically, then yes.

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To re-initialise the user's (presumably only one) data on each reboot, you could use a boot script to remove the user's home directory and re-create it from a master copy.

For the updates, which GNU/Linux distro are you using?

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Thanks klearview and catkin for your feedback.

We will have to make some tests with some distributions, but it will probably be a debian based distribution.

If it were Debian itself, I have not tried it but expect you could edit /etc/apt/sources.list to enable only your "update server machine". By default, Debian does not automatically update. There is probably a way to configure it to do so; if not it could be done by cron job (like scheduled task) or boot script so it is definitely do-able.

No need for boot scripts - use cron-apt to auto-update on Debian.

Thank you all. Now I have research material to work on : )