[Gllug] Building Intranet Kiosks

[William Palfreman]

Mozzila is pretty good today.  The way I would do it is set up a machine
with very little on it, apart from x, a wm and mozzila.  Lock it down by
removing all the services, switch off all your mingettys in /etc/inittab,
and use run level 5 by default.  With the X login screen use a picture with
the username and password displayed, then have Mozzila run as the shell.
This will mean that when they exit Mozzila the X server will restart.  Have
a script to start up something like blackbox or sawmill afterwards.  The
only dodgy bit is displaying a user/pass on screen.  I think a script to
su - nobody and run the xinit in /etc/inittab with respawn might do the
trick.  Maybe :).  Not that I've tried it, though.  I have seen something
very similar with little Sun boxes.

----- Original Message -----
From: "gabriel finch" <linuxkernel at blueyonder.co.uk>
To: <gllug at linux.co.uk>
Sent: Thursday, July 12, 2001 1:17 PM
Subject: Re: [Gllug] Building Intranet Kiosks


> FWIW, mozilla has plans for a kiosk mode, but it's not ready yet. See
> here:
>
> http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3341
>
>
> GF.
>
>
>
>
> Wulf Forrester-Barker wrote:
> >
> > 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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