initial thoughts on ltsp kiosk plugin

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi all,

we started using Oliver's LTSP kiosk plugin last night in the school
library.  It's really nice, even though there are a few small things that
may need ironing out.  In case anyone's interested or knows something I
don't, here are my initial notes.

1. for some reason metacity didn't install.  I didn't get a log of the
   ltsp-build-client, but for some reason, metacity didn't install and
   therefore firefox is running window manager-less.  I presume this is
   not deliberate as ~kiosk/.xsession tries to invoke metacity.

2. I don't imagine this is something that will be changed but I added
   sun-java5-plugin and flashplugin-nonfree in the chroot to make sites
   that use these work better.

3. I tried out sound with a couple of flash sites.  It didn't work, though
   it was clear that there was static on the headphones which was
   correlated to the sound I should have been getting.  This may be flash
   specific, I'm not sure.

4. firefox didn't go into full screen.  This may be related to the lack of
   window manager, I'm not sure.  If you press [F11] it did.

5. I need to test if USB keys work.

6. RAM seems in reasonable supply (just lots being cached), but I'm not
   certain if this is a good measure.
	$ free
	             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
	Mem:        125224     118516       6708          0          0      53492
	-/+ buffers/cache:      65024      60200
	Swap:        32760        724      32036

6. I'm thinking of ways we could perhaps expand on this.  Perhaps: 
   - a DVD player kiosk
   - add a multimedia player plugin to the existing firefox kiosk
   - make a simple application kiosk usable with data or even home
     directory stored on USB key.
   As we have very little time to give accounts to all students, it's
   possible this route might help give greater access to students.

Gavin