Customizing Ubuntu

[Kenton Brede]

On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 04:48:43PM +1000, Alfred Vahau (alfredv at upng.ac.pg) wrote:
> Hi,
> One week into using Ubuntu, I find it great and easy to use.
> I am now customizing it to use for online catalogue browing for our library.
> Firefox is preloaded so I have customized Firefox already.
> 
> What I want to know is what minimal functionality is required to use for 
> browsing the catalogue?
> I have disabled or deleted applications that I don't need like 
> OpenOffice suite, multimedia and graphics
> and mail applications.
> 
> I want to disable the right-mouse button which gives the properties of 
> the desktop and I want to disable the menu for a terminal.
> 
> Are there any tutorials that I can look up. Tutorials on the customizing 
> the Firefox are excellent from the Google
> search. I hope users familiart with applications of Ubuntu as a web 
> browser for the library systems will be able to throw
> in some tips that I can look into.

A quick search for "Linux kiosk" will net you lots of information.
There is a Linux kiosk HOTO -
http://www.linux.com/howtos/Kiosk-HOWTO-1.shtml

A few years back I created wireless kiosks for our library.  I used
Debian for the base.  It's been a long time but I will try to remember a
few key points.  Sorry I can't give you more specifics but maybe the
following will give you a few ideas.  

First it sounds like you did a default install.  I would go back and
install just the base system.  Do a "custom" or "custom expert" or
whatever it's called.  I've only done a couple Ubuntu installs so can't
quite remember :)  Anyway once you have your base system add just what
you need, stay minimal.  When I did it, I used fvwm and hacked the crap
out of it, so the only thing that worked was the left mouse button and 
the keyboard, in terms of user control.  I think I saw the other day
xfce has a kiosk mode.  Their site is down ATM so I can't verify that.
But that might be a good place to start for window manager.
http://www.xfce.org/  You can do just about anything with fvwm though.

Back to configuration.  I disabled the ctrl-alt-backspace sequence so
people couldn't restart X.  I limited ttys in /etc/inittab to only tty1, 
tty2, tty3  I then remapped ctrl-alt-(F1|F2|F3) to a different three key 
combination so I had a way out of the graphical interface, but made it 
difficult for others.  I used xmodmap for the key mapping.  I used some 
program (Sorry I can't remember the name of it.  If you are really 
interested I will try and dig it up.) to auto login my kiosk user account 
through /etc/inittab.  I think you can use minigetty to do this also.  In 
.bashrc for that account I spawned "startx" from a while loop so the only
way out of X was to kill it from the root account.  I set up iptables to
only allow access to our on-line card catalog.  So the final product
would auto boot into kiosk mode, which only allowed a browser at full
screen.  Oh I took away all window trimmings so they couldn't resize the
window.  The only way out of the X environment was a customized three
key combination.  It worked well for us.  

I've not looked at what people are doing with Linux kiosks right now, so
possibly the things I'm suggesting are already integrated into a
packaged configuration.  But maybe you can use a nugget or two from what
I've written.  Good luck and happy hacking.
Kent        

-- 
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
  - Martin Luther King Jr.