Single purpose system
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| NoDough Mar 20, 2008 8:44 AM EDT |
I have been tasked with setting up 4 machines that have a single purpose in life. They are to sit in the lobbies of each of our 4 offices and serve the online application from our web site. The online application, however, is not hosted by our site, but is linked to a third party who does that sort of thing professionally. So, the machines should boot up, load the browser, load that web page, and allow nothing else to be run. Additionally, after the web page is completed I need to recycle back to the online application page. How would you go about setting this up? |
| gus3 Mar 20, 2008 9:00 AM EDT |
KDE's Kiosk mode sounds like a good starting point, if my understanding of it is correct. |
| azerthoth Mar 20, 2008 9:05 AM EDT |
I have an idea, the only sticking point is I am unsure how to get the page information (what page on the site) back to the system. A simple startx so no environment is truly loaded, start FF or whatever with that page as home, or even fed from the exec 'mozilla-firefox http://www.yourpagehere.com'. A gateway set up that only allows the specific site you want, and a cron job to check the location that the browser is at, if it is at the completion page for the application it closes and restarts your browser back to the first page. Have to set up auto login, and it would be a good idea to have the user account have really really limited group permissions. It's an off the cuff idea, and being at work on a windows machine I cant do any poking right now to really detail any of it. |
| jdixon Mar 20, 2008 9:09 AM EDT |
> How would you go about setting this up? I've never done it, but I'd look into KDE's kiosk mode: http://developer.kde.org/documentation/tutorials/kiosk/index... http://dot.kde.org/997748764/ |
| NoDough Mar 20, 2008 9:12 AM EDT |
Gus: I'm not familiar with KDE's Kiosk mode. I'll definitely look into that. Azeroth: You are envisioning much the same environment that I was. I've even considered burning the end product to CD and running without hard drives. |
| NoDough Mar 20, 2008 9:13 AM EDT |
JD: Thanks for the links. |
| gdr Mar 20, 2008 1:22 PM EDT |
There is a DSL based livecd customized for this -- its called booth. http://sourceforge.net/projects/boothbox |
| NoDough Mar 20, 2008 3:46 PM EDT |
gdr: Thanks for the link. I checked it out and it looks like it could be a fit, but also looks like it was abandoned 3 years ago. |
| gdr Mar 21, 2008 5:56 AM EDT |
ND: No, there is no active development, but it works as is -- and, if you've worked w/ DSL, its easy enough to modify the iso he developed, and/or use the scripts for following the path he tread a few years ago. It is nice to have a single-purpose public access browser that is run in RAM-- booting off CD. His documentation will get you there even though there is no ongoing development. I put up a public access kiosk that goes to a single site, and will not allow anything else, using this system not long ago. |
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