[Kde-kiosk] newbie

[Martijn Klingens]

On Wednesday 22 December 2004 19:25, Romeo Theriault wrote:
> Hi all, I'm trying to lock down a kde machine for use with a internet
> kiosk. I've never worked with kde kiosk settings before, and I'm rather
> new to linux. I have the "README.kiosk" which is very informative, but I
> don't quite find it very user friendly. I'm not sure where to put this
> file (what to name it?) that has the config options? I just want it to
> work for one user account. Would someone be willing to let me know where
> I need to put it and what to name it to work for one person? And maybe,
> let me see an example config file so I have something to work with.

If you want to do it all by hand (which I don't recommend you to do) you 
should create a /etc/kderc to define the available profiles. The one I used 
at my talk at Sane 2004 in september looks like this:

------------------
martijn at martijn:/etc> cat kderc
[Directories]
kioskAdmin=martijn:
prefixes=/etc/opt/kde3/
profileDirsPrefix=/etc/kde-profile/
userProfileMapFile=/etc/kde-user-profile

[Directories-Sane2004]
prefixes=/etc/kde-profile/Sane2004/

[Directories-default]
ProfileDescription=Default profile
ProfileInstallUser=root
prefixes=/var/lib/kde-profiles/default
------------------

This tells KDE that there are two profiles, "Sane2004" and "default". Next you 
need to map users or groups to profiles. The above example 
uses /etc/kde-user-profile for that, but as you can see you can define your 
own file there. Mine looks like this:

------------------
martijn at martijn:/etc> cat /etc/kde-user-profile
[General]
groups=

[Users]
sane2004=Sane2004
------------------

This maps the user 'sane2004' to the profile 'Sane2004'. The last step is to 
actually put stuff in the profile. The folder as listed in /etc/kderc 
(/etc/kde-profile/Sane2004/ in my example) has the same structure as ~/.kde, 
so there is a 'share/' directory underneath, etc. Just make sure the access 
rights allow your locked down user to read the files and there you go!

> p.s  I've tried the kiosktool (gui interface) and found it very buggy.
> So I'm wanting to try through the config file.

In my experience it's not always very untuitive, but certainly not buggy. Did 
you try some development snapshot or an older version?

-- 
Martijn