Kiosk mode?

[Castor Troy]

I've been looking for a linux based kiosk live cd that I can run at some truck stops that I manage. I found a walkthrough that was for Knoppix v5 where you basically set the desktop to "kiosk" and it boots with no menus etc etc, and just opens firefox. However, it looks like the kiosk desktop has been removed from v7?

Do I have any other options? I haven't been able to find a walkthrough for v7.

[davea0511]

I used to use knoppix for this, but 5 years ago or so they seemed to take things in another direction ... I think Ubuntu and some other distros pulled enough people away which left Klaus a little less capable of supporting all the various projects Knoppix had split into.

If you're not married to Knoppix check out remastersys which works with Ubuntu-ish distros (like mint). Might be helpful:
http://maketecheasier.com/backup-ubuntu-with-remastersys/2008/12/22
http://askubuntu.com/questions/95392/how-to-create-a-bootable-system-with-a-squashfs-root
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCDCustomization

If you want it with KDE to give you a similar experience to Knoppix:
http://www.howtoforge.com/creating-a-kde-live-cd-dvd-using-kubuntu

[Capricorny]

I haven't done much GUI customization, but I wonder why it shouldn't work with Knoppix/KDE if it works with, say Ubuntu/KDE (kubuntu)? LXDE, the default since 6.0, may be less suited for this kind of customization, but you may still use KDE, Gnome or something else.

[davea0511]

I haven't done much GUI customization, but I wonder why it shouldn't work with Knoppix/KDE if it works with, say Ubuntu/KDE (kubuntu)? LXDE, the default since 6.0, may be less suited for this kind of customization, but you may still use KDE, Gnome or something else.

My understanding was that the remastersystool was designed specifically for the Ubuntu distro and that it wouldn't work with others.

I'm currently working on a kiosk myself, this time I've decided to mount and chroot right into the liveCD image of Kubuntu to make changes directly necessary to make it into a kiosk platform ... I see no reason why I couldn't do that with a more recent version Knoppix ... just have to use cloop instead of squashfs right? Here's a guide on how to do it with Kubuntu (4 years old but seems to be working fine - note some of the instructions are faulty, like missing a forward-slash at the end of rsync command for example, but it's pretty easy to detect when you're doing it):
http://www.michael-krueger.org/2008/07/remastering-kubuntu-live-cd.html