[Kde-kiosk] Kiosk intro

[Martijn Klingens]

Hi Celeste,

On Friday 21 October 2005 23:47, Celeste Lyn Paul wrote:
> What are some typical programs or use cases kiosk is used for?

The most common two use cases are kiosk setups (like internet cafes, point of 
sales systems and other dedicated systems) and corporate desktops.

Both share the fact that lots of settings need to be predefined by the admins 
and/or locked down. The difference is that kiosks often run only one or two 
apps that are almost completely locked (even without kicker and kdesktop 
running), while the corporate desktops are more open and only lock certain 
aspects (like company wallpapers to avoid explicit images). Some companies go 
further in making sure all desktops are roughly identical to ease support 
calls, but as far as I know most leave users a reasonable amount of freedom.

There's a third use case that is occasionally used by geek home users, but 
that is not in wide use amongst other users, which is parents who lock down 
desktops for children. The concepts behind kiosk are rather complex, and the 
GUI tool (kiosktool) isn't easy enough for this use case, making it too much 
work for the average parent to even consider this. Perhaps KDE 4 will open 
the road to this... *dreams on*

As for the typical programs that are used with kiosk, by far the most widely 
tested and used apps are Konqueror, Kontact, Kopete and the desktop itself. 
Other apps are more likely to support only a subset of kiosk or even have 
code that might not allow complete lockdown.

> Is it used in production anywhere?

There are a number of people on this list who use it in production. Some 
setups are big, like Stichting Vluchtelingenwerk (Council for Refugees) in 
the Netherlands (Jasper: how many desktops?), others are fairly small. Some 
are Kiosks, others are corporate desktops.

-- 
Martijn