Is there a knoppix Web Kiosk?

[skrat]

Serpent: thanks for bug report. It was disabled in previous version, after bug fixes (keyboard) dissabling of ctrl+alt+fn felt out. I found the bug and will be fixed in next release.

[digDug]

a kiosk that doesn't even look like a webpage. Something that boots up to no menubar, no statusbar, no addressbar - where the whole screen is filled 100% with customized HTML or Flash content from the start.

If you need to dominate the entire screen - this is a very nice plugin. I haven't seen it posted anywhere, my apologies if it is old.
http://www.mozdevgroup.com/clients/bm
This is incredibly easy to install but you'll need to try it out with Mozilla. You just click and it installs itself. When the kiosk plugin is in effect, none of the typical keyboard commands work - F11, CTRL+R, ALT+HOME, CTRL+N, CTRL+P, etc. If you run Mozilla without a window manager and set the plugin to fullscreen - you won't see any toolbars, title bars, buttons, window controls, or status bars. Scroll bars will appear if your content is bigger than the screen. That's it. For Internet Cafe's you can show/hide each of the buttons. Default password is admin..
Admin mode
xinit -e mozilla -kiosk admin
Kiosk mode
xinit -e mozilla -kiosk

Ctrl+Alt+Backspace works, but my end users only have an ELO touch screen to work with. I wish they supported FireFox as well. Still it is definitely worth a spin. I have only tested this with Knoppix. I'm not sure if the plugin works for Windows. Windows is this neat app that lets me run Winamp and make Flash movies, that's about it.

[Ghandalfar]

Requires Mozilla 1.7 or greater. Firefox currently not supported. :/

It will be interesting to give it a spin. Thanks for the link.

[sloughary]

I took a copy of stallion2.iso and installed mozilla as well as the kiosk mod listed above. If anyone is interested, let me know. It allows the browser to be completely locked down or you may choose which items to add.

If someone has a place I can upload it, I will

Shawn

[Steve F]

I spent the day with the Firefox live CD (vff4.iso). It sure is a lot easier than trying to get a KNOPPIX distro down to less than 200MB.

I added Autohide (www.krickelkrackel.de) to the mozilla-firefox directories and added some of my prefs in /etc/mozilla-firefox/prefs/firefox.js for proxy and startup page settings. I didn't get everything worked out but I'll try again tomorrow. I am not getting the total absolute full screen and I am not getting my server's index.html page.

I am setting up this configuration to use as an online secure exam client. The intention is to have my students boot their PC (laptop) from CD. The browser runs as single app with proxy from my testing server. The students will not be able to cheat by accessing other internet resources, local resources, or chat with their classmates during an exam.

I think I see in the matchbox startup for firefox where instead of cycling the browser on exit (after 10 seconds) I can cause a shutdown and retrieval (eject) of the CD.

Thanks for this solid work and any pointers will be appreciated.

[MoonShadow]

Fantastic, This is what I was looking for,

I'd been toying with the Idea of a web browser Kiosk machine for some time but Only got round to doing anything about it on friday after noon. By the time I left work Friday I'd found Stallion, burned the CD and convinced people this was a viable concept...

Great work

Just so you know, I was looking for a setup that would boot from a write protected media (so it cant be hackted) that runs a 'Standard' web browser (with address bar) but wont allow acces to anything else (console etc) So far all I need to do is to remove the boot menu, have the Keyboard as UK English and remove any access to other consoles (the ctrl alt fn ) Other than that any browser pugins (The likes of Macomedia / Acrobat etc) would be helpful.

I'm glad I found a Linux/FireFox solution, Too many people round here think WinDowz is the only desktop OS....

Thanks, you've saved me months of work

Serpent: thanks for bug report. It was disabled in previous version, after bug fixes (keyboard) dissabling of ctrl+alt+fn felt out. I found the bug and will be fixed in next release.

Let us know when its out..

[mataz]

Wy not making a kiosk knoppix remaster in the following way:
-Removing some rights to the default knoppix user, like the su / sudo command
-Removing hacking tools.
-Removing hard disk tools. (partitioning and writing)
-adding flash plugin.
-adding gaim chat client.
-adding cupsd at startup (plus the printer for the kiosk)
-adding streaming video/audio clients with browser plugin.
-very nice 3d gl game support (like HL, UT ecc.)

[MoonShadow]

There has been mention of this before but I'm not sure it was resolved,

I downloded & burned Stallion2.iso which worked great in a p4 2.4 a p3 733 an 800 laptop (a Samsung that a few years old) Vmware and Qemu.

As this is 99% perfict for what We want I attempted to demonstrate it / pass it on to various people.

Since then we've tried it on another 7 or so machines most of which dont boot claiming there to be no bootable os on the CD.
These vary in age from p 450 to 3Ghz (all intell processor) and all on a CD I tested first and have just booted from now..

Most of these machines have been booted off Linux CD's recently as we use Novells Zen works to install the workstations
(it uses Linux to Image the hard disk)

So basicly I cant think of a common factor as to why some work and others dont.
If anyone has any thoughts let me know and I'll get some one to give it a try...

[Steve F]

I altered the Firefox prefs on vff4.iso. Now every time it starts up I get a popup, "Old Extensions, Any old extensions that you have installed have been disabled." Anybody have an idea what this is referring to?

Also, I haven't been able to get my firefox prefs to work. I put them in the firefox.js under /etc and I can see them in about:config but browser.startup.homepage won't take. I get a blank page on start up and when I hit the home button it goes to some firefox site instead of the site I specified. I tried putting a home/morph in the /copy directory with complete user settings for firefox but got weirdness because the file premissions on my dev system don't match the LiveCD when it runs. Basically, I don't have a user called morph anywhere, and I can't find any configuration or symlink directories related to this user, yet it seems this user and its home directory configuration files are coming from somewhere. That, and the files I put in the /copy directory with group=users and chmod 777 end up on load as chmod 555. Firefox complains that the default user is already in use and I have to create another browser account. Then it complains that it can't write into the directory (555 duh) when I try to create one.

Anyway, I've spent the last few hours in morphix documentation trying to determine how and when the /home directory gets populated. I got nothing. What am I missing here? What is the proper way to alter the firefox profile?

Thanks,

[pwest3]

The downloads for stallion and firefox cd's aren't working for me. Is there anyplace else to get them from???

http://sigma.livecd.net/~skrat/stallion2.iso

and

http://sigma.livecd.net/~gandalf/vff4.iso

don't seem to go anywhere.