“Recently I wrote about locking down the GNOME desktop environment with Pessulus. In this article, I’ll show you how to do the same for KDE, using Kiosktool, a front end for changing the KDE configuration files in users’ home folders and the /etc/kde* folders.”
Anyone know if their is any software out there i could use to set up a linux box as a pay kiosk (ie: Cyberleader)
While I’m sure you’ve Google’d this a time or two, http://openkiosk.sourceforge.net/ might be worth giving try.
As for Kiosk software in general, I have been looking, rather platform unspecific, for an easy basic Linux Kiosk and was quite surprised that no one was filling this obvious, to me, large niche.
A small business (e.g. a hotel or even a car repair shop) wants to set up a webkiosk as gratis. Is there a live CD to just stick into any old hardware and suddenly have an additional free great service? No… not really I found. Flash 7 and Firefox 1, poorly configured.
The exception is actually a very new distro. Webconverger. Not centralized as you are looking for, but Firefox 2.x, Flash9, PDF, well configured, and custom ISO’s have your choice of default home, basic content filter, reset time, etc. http://webconverger.com/
Good luck : )
I’m not sure how to set up a pay kiosk. I have no idea about card-readers and authentication in that context. But assuming that you figured out the authentication ‘kiosk’ would be the tool to use to set up a KDE desktop quickly in kiosk mode. Well, that and or some combination of chmod, chown, and learning to set group permission (or whatever access control mechanisms you want to use).
Actually, I use kiosk on my home system regularly. It’s a really underrated little tool for KDE. In my case I have my user account, a couple of other users, and a guest user. Doesn’t sound like much. But until you’ve started twiddling menus, file association, desktop setups across multiple users so that they’re ‘just so’ this tool doesn’t really shine.
I may be a little obsessive compulsive, but this tool certainly has a place even on a lone Linux box that has more than 1 user. Many thanks to the author(s).