Ubuntu Kiosk Edition

Evan eapache at gmail.com
Sun Oct 12 19:17:55 UTC 2008


I was reading the wiki on the guest session for intrepid [1] and I started
thinking. It states on the wiki that the guest account is not currently
secure enough to act as a full kiosk. Does anyone know what work would need
to be done to produce a proper Ubuntu Kiosk Edition?

I would think that as along as the guest account has read only access to
anything configuration-related (including locations like ~/.gconf), and the
only writable folder (perhaps ~/Desktop) is cleaned upon log-out, then there
isn't much that a potential vandal could do unless they're willing to start
hacking the kernel. It would be necessary to hide any configuration applets
or menus that would touch on a read-only file (or at least to provide a
graceful "This is a kiosk, so you can't change that." alert), but a lot of
the apps that use these locations for actual data storage, such as
evolution, aren't the sort of apps that would normally be used at a kiosk
anyways, and could probably be removed completely.

I'm sure this is full of holes, please feel free to point them out.

Evan

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Specs/Intrepid/GuestAccount
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