[vox-tech] Linux Kiosk Distro

[Thomas Johnston]

I was guessing that this would be a common thing and would have a simple
tutorial somewhere. And I was thinking that using a major distro like
Ubuntu may not be the way to go. Would it not be easier to secure a
lightweight distro, because you can add only what functionality you need,
rather than remove all the stuff you don't?


On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 1:35 PM, Alex Mandel <tech_dev at wildintellect.com>wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> vox-tech mailing list
> vox-tech at lists.lugod.org
> http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.lugod.org/pipermail/vox-tech/attachments/20120612/8827345e/attachment.htm