Hi all, I have an old laptop with a dead battery (it's presently running Ubuntu fine, not that it actually does anything though).  I'm also developing a web-based booking service for an aircraft club (of which I'm a member, it's not a paying job). 

What I want to do is take said laptop, strip it down of anything that could cause trouble (and could be useful in my parts bin) - namely, hard drive, floppy, dvd, and have a completely minimal linux+X11+web browser type deal on a USB thumb drive (which I'd try and stash in the now somewhat empty innards of the laptop) such that it's a solid state type setup - turn on and in a short while it's booted up and displaying this web based system in the browser (no window manager, no nothing, just the browser, ful screen kiosk style). If it crashes, or hangs, or somebody turns it off, press the power button, problem solved.  Preferably of course, the flash drive would be set to read only for extra protection.

This seems like something that somebody has probably already done, in the generic sense of a flash-bootable linux based web-kiosk distribution.  Has anybody seen something out there that might be suitable?  I could roll-my-own I suppose, but it's a whole lot of work that I'd rather avoid if that wheel's already been invented.