Proposal to system administration documentation/software in SoK (Kiosk)

[Aleix Pol]

On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:41 AM, Frederico Goncalves Guimaraes
<frederico at teia.bio.br> wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> I would like to know the viability of a project for SoK. I'm a Brazilian and,
> in my city, we use a custom version of Debian in our municipal schools
> (approximately 7.500 computers). Our desktop environment is Plasma and we need
> to define different default settings for this machines (for example, mouse
> double click to open files/directories). And sometimes we need to change some
> of these settings too (for example, proxy settings).
>
> On KDE 3 I used Kiosk and loved it. Still used the framework on Plasma 4 and
> I'm trying to use it on 5, but sometimes I can't find documentation explaining
> what file or parameter I need to alter to achieve my objective. Here enter my
> proposal.
>
> I would like to organize the documentation in a central hub, where we could
> find information about desktop settings, in a way that we could it to
> automatize settings changes. For example, if I want to activate automount of
> removable devices, I need to alter parameter X in file Y. This would be even
> better if we could recreate Kiosk admin tool. So, I would like to know if this
> is a valid proposal.
>
> Is so, I would like to know if I could be a mentor for this project. My area
> of expertise is educational use of free software and data organization. I have
> some experience in system administration and have a big lab for testings
> (those 7.500 machines that I mentioned before).  ;-)  My programming skills
> are restrict to some scripts in Perl and Bash. But I have a good experience in
> programming logic. So, I couldn't help with coding, but could analyze and
> evaluate produced softwares. Is this enough?
>
> If this is really a viable project (and if I have the requisites to be a
> mentor), what do I need to do next?

Hi Federico,
I agree it's definitely something to improve. Kiosk is a really
powerful tool to love and cherish.

I'd suggest getting in touch with Plasma (i.e. plasma-devel at kde.org)
and come up with a plan towards the next steps in kiosk. Hopefully
you'd be able to infer a proposal from there.
As for mentoring, we usually have people already familiar with the
inner works of KDE as well as its people, so you probably want to get
your own hands dirty first! ;-)

Aleix