[Kde-kiosk] Is there anybody there? :-) [RFC]

[Sean McGlynn]

Hello,

Just found this list by accident and noticed that it hadn't actually been 
used since a brief flurry of postings last October. I was wondering if it was 
still the place for discussion of 'locking down' KDE issues?

Waldo (if you're there), I read part one of your "Support for kiosk 
operation" draft, and noticed you've got a TODO against KDE3.1 for all this 
stuff. Did you ever write a part two or have you got any other general info 
on all this?

The reason I'm asking is that I've been trying to do my bit for KDE by 
answering user questions on the kde and kde-linux mailing lists. A few people 
recently have been sysadmins trying to lock down their systems in one way or 
another. Most people have read about the City of Largo project and had a look 
at the "KDE Kiosk Mode HOWTO", and most questions are easy enough for myself 
and others to track down the answers. However, it would be nicer to have a 
specific mailing list (and possibly a kiosk.kde.org site) to discuss all the 
issues/questions raised, in order to cut down the signal/noise ratio on the 
more general lists. I'd obviously be happy to help out, doing documentation 
and perhaps maintaining the site or whatever, as I'm interested in this area.

To let you know just what prompted me to want to take things in this 
direction, I've been talking to Janyne Kizer, of the North Carolina State 
University, on the kde list. I didn't realise the scale of the KDE rollout 
Janyne was trying to do until I asked as a "BTW". The response (below) even 
makes Largo look quite small.

 <quote>
 > you want to answer a whole load of user questions (how many users are we
 > talking about here BTW?).
 I'm sorry, I was just re-reading your note and I realized that I did not
 respond to your question about our environment.  1300 users on 100
 servers (all remote) located in 100 counties throughout the state. 
 These servers are on slow links mostly (56k to 128k to T1 lines) -- thus
 the one server per site model booting from the server with diskless
 xterminals.  We have only 2.5 fulltime support people for these sites so
 simple is good.
 </quote>

Comments please.

Cheers,
Sean
-- 
Sean McGlynn
sean@tmiau.com

BGITSOS