Is there a knoppix Web Kiosk?

[Steve F]

I guess it depends which distribution it is applied to.

On Firefox LiveCD (vff4.iso) I believe the .mozilla directory under /home/morph doesn't exist until Firefox is started up. Since Firefox can't find it, Firefox creates it as if this is the first time it has ever been run for this user (morph). If I use /copy the directories are created for [f3dbc060.default] but the only thing in it is the prefs.js. It gets created by default as read only owner root group root. Firefox can't do anything with it and won't use it, instead offering the user manager screen and advising me to create a user for myself. If I try, it fails I think because Firefox can't write to the .mozilla directory. I have had partial success putting a script in /exec that changes the .mozilla directory group to users and chmod -R 777 but then Firefox started creating a different profile directory for default and ignored mine. Next I am going to try taking the whole .mozilla directory while LiveCD is booted and copy it to my build source /copy directory. That way my rebuilt iso should have a real copy of the morph user profile for Firefox. I may get to try that tomorrow.

Before all this I tried adding my configuration to firefox.js and forget the user prefs. I could never get it to respect my home directory setting even though I could see it when I used about:config. Also, I am using autohide.xpi to get the full screen mode. That takes some sorting out and may be interfering with my test run succeding.

G, Thank you for you fine work on this distribution. I am further along than when I was trying to get a KNOPPIX distro small enough to fit on a 200mb CD and still function correctly, let alone get a browser configured. Please feel free to point out any misunderstandings I have on the sequence of execution or expected behavior.

[Steve F]

Another behavior I need is when the browser is terminated, the CD is umount, ejected, and shutdown is called. The umount and eject work fine. I already set up sudo so morph is allowed to run shutdown. The problem is once the CD is ejected, the shutdown program is no longer available (or any other bin or sbin). Any thoughts on how I can run a command from the ram disk? Maybe I can copy the shutdown program to morph home directory and execute it from there? I looked on Morphix docs for information on what directories are sym linked to the CD and which are in ram disk but haven't found that kind of info, only examples that don't address these kinds of topics. I (ctrl-alt-Fn) switched to another console but I didn't see that any directories are sym linked. Don't know what I did wrong there. I'm not a newbe to Linux, in fact my first computers 25 years ago were all unix (up to System 5 rel 3). I have a gap over the last 15 years of no unix and this last year started catching up.

[Ghandalfar]

Hmm, how do you do your umount and eject? I'd like to include that back into next version.

Otherwise, why not run shutdown -h 1 i, unmount and eject and system will shutdown after one minute. Since binary will be read into memory (it will just wait 1minute) you won't have that problem anymore.

[flickerfly]

I hear rumors of a stallion3 with better ability to handle these sorts of modifications is in process. Is there a time frame?

[Steve F]

To get the CD to eject on Firefox LiveCD (vff4.iso)

I installed from debian the packages (apt-get while chroot'ed) sudo and eject.
I altered /usr/bin/firefox.sh

#!/bin/bash

#while [ 1 ]
#do
/usr/bin/firefox -fullscreen $1
# sleep 10
sudo /bin/umount -l /cdrom
sudo /usr/bin/eject /dev/cdrom
sudo /sbin/shutdown now
#done

Obviously this is the script that can't shutdown because after the CD is ejected the shutdown program is no longer available. Since I want to use this distro as a secure exam platform, each student after exiting firefox will probably not want to wait one minute for the computer to shutdown. As an alternative I might just instruct them that after the CD ejects they can turn the power off or better would be if they could hit ctrl-alt-del to reboot into their native OS. By the way, they will take these exams on their own computer and we are trying to set it up where they cannot access their HD, internet, or chat with their classmates during an exam.

[Ghandalfar]

Steve F: I think 1min for cd to eject and for X11 to properly shutdown is not too much. I'll do some more experiments.

Giving deadlines is a bit ungreatful. We (livecd.net team) will try to have something ready by February.

[Steve F]

I hope the deadline thing was in response to another person's question; take as long as it takes and thank you for including me both in guidance and accepting my contributions.

I can't use shutdown. The init process has initctl piped on a different filesystem than the one running the computer. I get the typical error 'init: timeout opening/writing control channel /dev/initctl'. I found out that reboot -f responds. Now in firefox.sh I copy /sbin/halt to /home/morph/reboot, umount, eject, reboot -f and 15 seconds later I'm back in windows. This is pretty slick!

I have read some articles that suggest killing X11 can disrupt the video h/w. That's news to me as I haven't experienced any problems rebooting back into windows. I hope they meant killing X and trying to restart back into X without rebooting is a no-no.

Now to fix the firefox config overrides and I'll be pretty much done. I plan to try using firefox command line option -CreateProfile "myprofilename", copy my prefs.js to "myprofilename", start the browser session with -p "myprofilename". I still have to straighten out the autohide global installation. I can't do it chroot'ed because firefox will fail when it can't find an X session to run under even though it never goes GUI on global extension installation. I had a partial success installing firefox on my workstation, adding the global extension and then copying the /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox and /var/lib/mozilla-firefox directories from my workstation to the morph_hd source directory. I'll tell the results of all this tomorrow afternoon USA central time.

[flickerfly]

Giving deadlines is a bit ungreatful. We (livecd.net team) will try to have something ready by February.

I don't mean to give you a deadline and I apologize for that being conveyed. It is only that I am under a deadline and can't seem to get this working as expected so was wondering if something was planned. I don't mean to rush you.

I'll probably work it out another way and revisit this next time around. I appreciate your work on it and am greatful for the progress you have made.

[Ghandalfar]

I meant to give myself a deadline

[flickerfly]

I meant to give myself a deadline

oh, you stretch my english with an uncommon usage of that word. Thanks!