[Gllug] Building Intranet Kiosks

[Wulf Forrester-Barker]

The hospital I work for has just started an initiative called 'The Virtual Cybercafe'. We've got three PCs set aside for it in areas where staff don't ordinarily have access to computers as part of their job, and an intranet site that anyone round the trust can access. Cool...

The system is currently running on standard PCs, using a fairly well locked down version of Win98 and IE5.5. On boot up it loads the OS and then the browser, and the user can do very little which doesn't involve a web browser. We've turned off various things in the browser, like Internet Options, and it works reasonably well....

But, now that it's been running for a week or so, we're hitting some problems - for example users have been resetting the home page (cos IE5 + allows developers to write scripting code that does this) and playing around with the toolbars. It may be possible to lock IE down even further, and also to refresh the relevant chunks of Windows registry on bootup so that any damage is reset.

However, I wonder if it might be an opportunity to put in an open source solution. Since we're working on the basis that the main target group of users have little or no computing experience, they *don't* need IE like on their desktops, because they don't have desktop machines to worry about. All they need is a reliable browser that will do a good job of rendering most pages thrown at it and be easy for us to lock down in a stable configuration.

Can anyone suggest some pointers to projects along this line. I was thinking in terms of a Linux box booting straight into a graphical interface and browser, with no user interaction needed (or allowed). The browser would be something like Konqueror or Mozilla, but without the options for user customisation. Any administration on the machine could be done remotely via telnet or a secure shell. If we have to build it ourselves, the project will probably remain based on MS software... but if there's a ready rolled alternative it might help me drive the Open Source wedge a bit deeper ;-)

Wulf




wulf.f-b at uhl.nhs.uk

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