It's not a technical question so much as a social problem.
First the situation:
My mom has a boyfriend... from Turkey. Turkey is (for all intents and purposes) the second world country and not a big ugly bird in this case.
Sedat has a family and a highschool aged kid there. He works his balls off to finance her education and even went as far as buying his family a PC for homework and communication.
Now the problem:
They keep installing garbage on that Dell Windows machine so neither homework nor communication gets done. It's been fixed 4 times now. You probably know how fast Windows gets shafted by teens and how Turkey probably is the Wild West for virusses.
This is where it clicked:
They don't need Windows. They need granny Linux. Like Knightwise came up with:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuForGrandma
What it boils down to is that I, probably at some point this year, will be shipped there in a vegetable crate with a bag of CD's.
It's an 8 hour flight there, so it'll be an (unpaid) "vacation". My last one in Europe, pending my plans to move to Australia.
I'm only likely to go there once ever, so it must never break. I want to put enough Linux on that PC to let them Skype and type out stuff.
Here's where your help would be very much appreciated:
What do I need to know about setting up remote accessing and security to not have them end up with a fancy Dell brick? What Distro is most likely to survive? I'm thinking Ubuntu.
I would love it if you guys could give some pointers, as this is quite a risky little adventure I'm trying to pull off.
If I fix it, I'll be the hero and linux will triumph. If I fail, then they'll end up screwing around with virusses and trojans until someone's credit card gets stolen or worse.
AND IT'LL BE ALL MY FAULT.
Will the box be nat'ed behind some sort of DSL box?
If not I'd just put ssh on a stupid port like 55555 and have the box send a weekly "status' email with ifconfig -a, df -h, ps auxww and so forth.
Perhaps also run apt-get update and send the output.
There are probably free flash based desktop sharing solutions these days but I've never tried.
I really have no idea what the situation is there. I assume they've got a cable-modem, possibly with a built in firewall to which I will have no access.
SSH certainly isn't my strong point. Not much of Linux is to be honest.
I like Knightwise' take on it though. With his "Killroy 2.0" idea, he proposes that I would make them large independent of the hardware they use. I like the idea of making a bootable OS on a flashdrive over here that would be easy to back up and install over there.
What I still do need to find out though is how to make a "custom" distro for them with all their email and account information filled in.
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