[Nottingham] Making a padded cell...

[Paul Sladen]

On Thu, 2 Dec 2004, David Aldred wrote:
> My laptop is (probably) going to be used as a rolling slideshow machine at  a 
> party this weekend - rolling through lots of pictures from the past of the 
> young lady whose 21st birthday it will be :-)

I trust they will be 'clean' and not too unkind!

> - Set up a new user for the event,
> - Put the picture files into that user's home directory with permissions 444, 
> - Kill the screensaver
> - Start Digikam rolling the slideshow
> - Cover the keyboard with something beerproof

I have one of the special keys on my ThinkPad set to start 'xtrlock', a
*exceedingly* simple screen-locker that shows nothing except changing the
mouse-cursor into a padlock.

One of the beauties of this is that you can start something like a
screen-saver or slide-show and then lock the screen, _without_ generating a
keypress event that might clear whatever you've just set running.

You could always do something like:

  $ sleep 60 ; xtrlock &

then startup Digikam or your chosen software.  After sixty seconds the
screen will be magically locked and nothing be able to happen until you
enter that user's password.

	-Paul
-- 
Is there no safe way to travel?  London, GB