[Kde-kiosk] Our kiosk is live!

[Bill Kendrick]

Yesterday, Omsoft Technologies, a local ISP in Davis, along with the
Davis Community Network, a non-profit research and community service
organization, replaced one of their public terminals (kiosks) with
one put together by the Linux Users' Group of Davis (LUGOD).

The old system was, I believe, Windows 2000 running Netscape 4.x.
The new system is running Debian 3.0 Linux with KDE 3.1.x and Konqueror
with lots of kiosk framework stuff enabled.  (Thanks, everyone!)


It's set up in "Newsbeat," a local newspaper/magazine shop in downtown Davis
(near Sacramento, California's state capital).  I dropped by yesterday to
see if it had been set up, and when I discovered it was, I asked if they
had gotten any questions about it.  Apparently, it was only just installed
earlier in the day, so no questions/problems yet. :^)


I spent a few minutes poking at it, and came up with a list of issues
and tweaks it should get:

  * Text console is garbled
    (Not that it matters TOO much, since noone should be using it.
    I'm just not sure what may have changed that is causing this.
    Perhaps the video card got jostled loose?)

  * Scroll wheel doesn't work
    (When I set it up, they gave me a two-button mouse.  It's been set up
    with a wheely mouse, though, so it'd be nice to get the wheel working.)

  * Needs more RAM!
    (It's only got 48 or 64MB of RAM, and could definitely benefit from more!)

  * KDM comes back w/o auto-login
    (If you Ctrl-Alt-Bksp, X gets killed, and KDE comes back up logged in
    as the default user.  Perfect!  But, if someone selects "Logout" from the
    K menu, it jumps back to the KDM login screen.  Not a BIG deal, since
    one can just hit [Enter] since the default user has no password.
    But still an annoyance.)

  * "New Session" option should go away
    (This was added to the K menu during the last 'apt-get upgrade' I did
    of KDE 3, and I didn't have time to find out how, if it's possible, to
    remove this option. :^( )

  * file:///known/path/to/a/file  works
    (You can't browse with "file:///" or look at directories with a
    file browsing dialog, but you CAN still open local files if you type
    them in the "Location" bar, if you know the filename ahead of time :^( )

  * "Location" pulldown should go away
    (For privacy, it'd be nice if the history of the 'Location' couldn't
    be seen.  I have text-completion disable, but people can still just
    click the little 'down-arrow' icon on the right to pull down the
    URL history.)


Other than that, I think it's good to go!  I encouraged them to do a full
backup of the hard disk, "Just In Case."  I'm not sure if they did or not,
though.


Anyway, thanks everyone!


References:

  Omsoft:   http://www.omsoft.com/
  DCN:      http://www.dcn.org/
  LUGOD:    http://www.lugod.org/
  Nesbeat:  http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/go/newsbeat/davisinfo.html


-bill!
root at lugod.org
http://www.lugod.org/