[vox-tech] Linux Kiosk Distro

[Alex Mandel]

On 06/12/2012 12:57 PM, Thomas Johnston wrote:
> A friend of mine asked me if I could help him with a project: building an
> internet kiosk machine running some flavor of Linux. The computer is to be
> used by the public in his volunteer organization. I said I have no real
> exerience with that, but I would give it a shot. I have done some searching
> online and it looks like there are many ways to go about the project but I
> thought I would solicit advice from Lugod before getting too far into it. I
> noticed that there are several hundred posts regarding "kiosks" on vox-tech.
> 
> Some requirements/desires:
> It needs to be free, or very close to free.
> We would like users to have web browser access and that's it. The web
> browswer should have Active X support (I am leaning towards Chromium)
> If the user could be presented with a fullscreen browser and nothing else,
> that would be great.
> Requires little to no maintenance.
> 
> 
> The computer itself is actually pretty nice, a Dell Dimension 9100. I
> haven't played with the machine to verify that it is still in its original
> form, but Dell Service Tag (9D7D881) says it has the following specs:
> 
> http://www.dell.com/support/troubleshooting/us/en/19/Index?c=us&s=dhs&cs=19&l=en&t=system
> 
> 
> 
> Any advice on what distribution to use, tutorials to follow, etc. would be
> greatly appreciated.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> thomas
> 
> 

Unless I've missed something ActiveX doesn't work on non-Windows
machines as it requires a IE install, even if using the Chrome IE
emulator thing.

This topic has come up before and I want to say that Firefox has a kiosk
mode maybe?

Any of the major distros should be usable for such a mode, you'll
probably be interested in the Ubuntu automatic security updates feature
which will keep the security patches going without need for you to do
anything. The only ones that require a person are kernel updates, but if
you cron schedule reboots that might take care of it too.

Enjoy,
Alex