[Kde-kiosk] Simple Lock down?

[Waldo Bastian]

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On Tue December 02 2003 10:33, Angus Clarke wrote:
> Well guys, thanks for the advice,
>
> It sounds like I am thinking about this the wrong way. Perhaps you may
> comment on my goals:
>
> 1) To setup terminal window access to run a curses based application
> (Konsole will only need to run the app. and exit, - thanks for your
> concerns Bill, you are quite right)
>
> 2) To give users Internet Access / Email (Mozilla was suggested, simply
> because I use it all the time.)
>
> 3) Remove as much other functionality as possible.
>
> Using RedHat 9.0 (I know they are abandoning their product range) or
> Mandrake 9.1 (Chapter 11 etc.) - I need to use a standard distro. for
> familiarity to my support staff.
>
> VNC supporting terminals (Axel 3000 - very good if you haven't seen
> them, they use standard PS/2 keyboards/mice and standard PC monitor's)
>
> I don't know how to remove all the applications from the Kpanel (and not
> allowing users to re-add applications), removing "right click
> functionality" from the desktop etc. etc.

I suggest to have a look at SUSE 9.0 because it will be supported for some 
time to come and has a backport of KDEs 3.2 new menu technology which makes 
creating a custom menu with a few entries much easier.

For internet access you could use Konqueror / KMail although Mozilla might 
also do the job. I can't help you with setting up Mozilla though.

I suggest you start with creating how you would like the desktop and menus to 
look like. Once you have that you can start locking it down to make sure that 
users can't modify it, and can't do things you don't want them to do.

A word of warning, the aim of KDEs kiosk features is to offer a way to remove 
those user interface elements that you don't want to be used. A sufficiently 
determined user might still find other ways to do certain things so you 
should always make sure that even when a user would have full shell access, 
that UNIX file permissions will prevent the user from doing real harm to the 
system.

To adjust the menus on SUSE 9.0, look for a file named 
default_applications.menu and copy this file to 
$HOME/.config/menu/applications.menu

This file contains a description of the menu layout in XML. Each menu is 
described by a <Menu>...</Menu> section. Apart from the "Settings" menu you 
can throw out those menus that you don't want.

The default menus specify the applications that should be placed in the menu 
with something like:
                <Include>
                        <Category>Development</Category>
                </Include>

The above includes all applications that list "Development" in their .desktop 
file as Categories

Instead of using categories you can also explictly name the applications that 
you want, for example to create a menu with KMail and Konqueror you could 
use:
                <Include>
                        <Filename>kde-KMail.desktop</Filename>
                        <Filename>kde-konqueror.desktop</Filename>
                </Include>

If you don't want to mess with XML yourself, you can also remove the 
<Menu>...</Menu> parts from applications.menu (But not the one for Settings!) 
and then readd applications with KMenuEdit.

A full description of how the menus work can be found here:
http://pdx.freedesktop.org/Standards/menu-spec/menu-spec-0.7.html

Cheers,
Waldo
- -- 
bastian at kde.org -=|[ SUSE, The Linux Desktop Experts ]|=- bastian at suse.com
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