[vox-tech] Public Access Terminals

[Bill Kendrick]

On Mon, Mar 17, 2003 at 06:17:15PM -0800, Ricardo Anguiano wrote:
> 
> I don't know that I understand the problem exactly, but what about
> something like knoppix on a diskless workstation?  
> 
>         http://www.knoppix.com/
> 
> It seems suited to public terminal life.

Well, the boxes have disks, so there's not really any reason to not use them.
Not using them causes, I assume, a speed hit.

Also, there's just SO much to Knoppix.  What DCN/Omsoft wanted
(for the Newsbeat kiosk, and I assume also for the Co-Op one), is
something with a web browser.

Period.

Nothing else. :^)


There are of course many ways (CDROM + diskless, permissions/ownership hacking,
clean-up-after-logout[*], etc.) to make a machine hard to mess with, but
to me that's kind of like snipping a wire on your IDE cable instead of
using chmod.  Sure, it works, but it's more brute force. :^)

If something like KDE and Konq can be told "hey, only show web pages,
that's it", then why not use it?


... of course, after that web-browser-using-KHTMLPart example during
tonight's talk really got me thinking... "Why not just write a web browser?"
(Rather than take an existing one and disable 90% of it)

:^)

-bill!

-- 
bill@newbreedsoftware.com                                            Hire me!
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