Asset management application (or distro)

Sounds like what you need is a fixed asset management system:

Try glpi from the repositories or one of these sourceforge projects:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/fams/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/osinventory/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/starclient/

GLPI is available in the Ubuntu repository. It's a pretty well-made FOSS asset management system.

screenshots

demo

sudo apt-get install glpi

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