I am working on a Kiosk puplet. It is a version of Litepup that boots directly to Firefox. I have an acquaintance for whom I am creating this. Please let me know how I can improve it.
http://www.toddrichardson.com/kpup/
Sincerely,
Todd Richardson
Testing kPup 2.14 - Kiosk Puplet
Kiosk Browser
Todd,
For the kiosk browser work I've done, I selected Opera rather than Firefox and I've been very pleased with that. Opera has several built in command line option switches that take a lot of the work out of setting up a kiosk browser and I found Opera to be a lot easier to customize.
One key to a kiosk browser is that the user shouldn't be able to get out of the browser and into the system at all. Obviously you still have to eliminate that possibility. Opera does that automatically in Kiosk Mode.
Another aspect is that you want to give the user an easy way to get to the pre-selected set of web sites but no others. I did that by creating special buttons that sat in the toolbar area. In Opera I had easy and complete control of what buttons would be available to the user and which would not be available.
And a Kiosk browser needs to return to the home page if unused for a long time.
For the kiosk browser work I've done, I selected Opera rather than Firefox and I've been very pleased with that. Opera has several built in command line option switches that take a lot of the work out of setting up a kiosk browser and I found Opera to be a lot easier to customize.
One key to a kiosk browser is that the user shouldn't be able to get out of the browser and into the system at all. Obviously you still have to eliminate that possibility. Opera does that automatically in Kiosk Mode.
Another aspect is that you want to give the user an easy way to get to the pre-selected set of web sites but no others. I did that by creating special buttons that sat in the toolbar area. In Opera I had easy and complete control of what buttons would be available to the user and which would not be available.
And a Kiosk browser needs to return to the home page if unused for a long time.
Invoking Opera in Kiosk mode
I've taken to starting Opera with a script that reads something like:
As such, it goes to the page I specify and the issue of restarting doesn't happen. I wanted to leave the user with as few confusing questions as possible.
Fullscreen is the issue that is giving me the most heartache as it just doesn't seem to work the way I expect.
Code: Select all
#! /bin/sh
opera http://www.yahoo.com -k -fullscreen -nomenu -nosysmenu
Fullscreen is the issue that is giving me the most heartache as it just doesn't seem to work the way I expect.
Thank you Skimmel for your fast reply.
I run Opera the same way as you. The only difference is that i need the URL input field and the navigate buttons so i use the switch -kioskbuttons. With your solution to put the start URL to the script, everything looks fine. But the URL field is write protected. Why is that Opera under Linux so buggy !!??
Than you , Satman
I run Opera the same way as you. The only difference is that i need the URL input field and the navigate buttons so i use the switch -kioskbuttons. With your solution to put the start URL to the script, everything looks fine. But the URL field is write protected. Why is that Opera under Linux so buggy !!??
Than you , Satman
Satman,
I wanted to restrict where the user could go to a limited set of urls. What I did was create my own set of buttons to populate the top bar that would automatically take the user to the 20 or however many sites I could allow them.
At least it all worked that way when I set it up using windoze. The linux version of Opera is a bit more difficult to work with. Options that worked just fine in windoze don't seem to work at all in Linux.
Skimmel
I wanted to restrict where the user could go to a limited set of urls. What I did was create my own set of buttons to populate the top bar that would automatically take the user to the 20 or however many sites I could allow them.
At least it all worked that way when I set it up using windoze. The linux version of Opera is a bit more difficult to work with. Options that worked just fine in windoze don't seem to work at all in Linux.
Skimmel