Best Distro for Publicly Used Computers?

Howdy y'all.
I was wondering if anybody had some advice as to what distro would be best for a low-power, publicly used computer. My dorm is getting two computers for our common room ("Destitute" model here: http://media.photobucket.com/image/rece … /Guide.png ). I am however, not sure what to put on it.
Here are the requirements that I am looking at:
1. Must run on low-performance computer
2. Must be able to play Flash videos and run Shockwave applications
3. Must be able to run LibreOffice.
I was thinking about Linux Mint, because I need something that people can maintain after I leave (so Arch is not really an option, sadly), but I was also wondering if it would be possible to run a completely free distro that met these requirements.
Right now, my top choices would be Linux Mint, gNuSense (not sure if it meets the requirements though), and Xubuntu. Does anybody have suggestions?
Additionally, does anybody know where I could procure a 40 GB hard drive? I have been searching on NewEgg, but they only have refurbished models. This computer really only needs to have enough space to run the OS, since people will be saving stuff to their own flash drives.
Input/Advice/Ideas would be appreciated, thank you.

janvaletin wrote:I can see how I would be able to set up a regular file deletion with cron. How would I be able remove installed applications while protecting ones I installed?
There's a few ways you could do this, you could save the list of packages you installed and periodically spit out a new list, then diff that with the old list, remove packages that aren't on both. Unless you give out the root password, or put people in sudoers, people aren't going to install software. Your issue will be more that people will mess with the configuration settings to stuff, which will result in a periodically less and less usable desktop, or just some embarrassing bookmarks. If you use a dedicated guest account for people logging in, you could just periodically delete and recreate the account to revert it back to a "clean" state. Somebody claimed there's a "kiosk mode" for Xubuntu, I'd look into that, it sounds like something useful for you.
janvaletin wrote:As far as the hard drive goes, I only need enough to run the OS, and since I will be building the computers, I figured I should aim for the cheapest solution possible.
The cheapest, new, spinning-platter drive you are going to find is going to be 80GB, I assumed that machine came with a 500GB drive because that's what the linked spec-sheet indicated. If it doesn't, and you want to consider other options you could do something like:
1) Don't put a harddrive in the things at all, build yourself a livecd image and run the machine off that (annoying to update, but no-worries about reverting to a clean state, just reboot the machine) Also, no need to worry about harddrive failure.
2) Get a usb flash drive and run the machine off that, you could probably get a working system on 4GB, 8GB for sure. You won't save much money doing this though, maybe $10/$20 and, unless you've got a motherboard with an external usb-port soldered right on the board, you'll have to worry about someone yanking the drive out and rendering your system in-operable.

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