Customizing Ubuntu

[Alfred Vahau]

Kenton Brede wrote:

>On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 04:48:43PM +1000, Alfred Vahau (alfredv at upng.ac.pg) wrote:
>  
>
>>Hi,
>>One week into using Ubuntu, I find it great and easy to use.
>>I am now customizing it to use for online catalogue browing for our library.
>>Firefox is preloaded so I have customized Firefox already.
>>
>>What I want to know is what minimal functionality is required to use for 
>>browsing the catalogue?
>>I have disabled or deleted applications that I don't need like 
>>OpenOffice suite, multimedia and graphics
>>and mail applications.
>>
>>I want to disable the right-mouse button which gives the properties of 
>>the desktop and I want to disable the menu for a terminal.
>>
>>Are there any tutorials that I can look up. Tutorials on the customizing 
>>the Firefox are excellent from the Google
>>search. I hope users familiart with applications of Ubuntu as a web 
>>browser for the library systems will be able to throw
>>in some tips that I can look into.
>>    
>>
>
>A quick search for "Linux kiosk" will net you lots of information.
>There is a Linux kiosk HOTO -
>http://www.linux.com/howtos/Kiosk-HOWTO-1.shtml
>
>A few years back I created wireless kiosks for our library.  I used
>Debian for the base.  It's been a long time but I will try to remember a
>few key points.  Sorry I can't give you more specifics but maybe the
>following will give you a few ideas.  
>
>First it sounds like you did a default install.  I would go back and
>install just the base system.  Do a "custom" or "custom expert" or
>whatever it's called.  I've only done a couple Ubuntu installs so can't
>quite remember :)  Anyway once you have your base system add just what
>you need, stay minimal.  When I did it, I used fvwm and hacked the crap
>out of it, so the only thing that worked was the left mouse button and 
>the keyboard, in terms of user control.  I think I saw the other day
>xfce has a kiosk mode.  Their site is down ATM so I can't verify that.
>But that might be a good place to start for window manager.
>http://www.xfce.org/  You can do just about anything with fvwm though.
>
>Back to configuration.  I disabled the ctrl-alt-backspace sequence so
>people couldn't restart X.  I limited ttys in /etc/inittab to only tty1, 
>tty2, tty3  I then remapped ctrl-alt-(F1|F2|F3) to a different three key 
>combination so I had a way out of the graphical interface, but made it 
>difficult for others.  I used xmodmap for the key mapping.  I used some 
>program (Sorry I can't remember the name of it.  If you are really 
>interested I will try and dig it up.) to auto login my kiosk user account 
>through /etc/inittab.  I think you can use minigetty to do this also.  In 
>.bashrc for that account I spawned "startx" from a while loop so the only
>way out of X was to kill it from the root account.  I set up iptables to
>only allow access to our on-line card catalog.  So the final product
>would auto boot into kiosk mode, which only allowed a browser at full
>screen.  Oh I took away all window trimmings so they couldn't resize the
>window.  The only way out of the X environment was a customized three
>key combination.  It worked well for us.  
>
>I've not looked at what people are doing with Linux kiosks right now, so
>possibly the things I'm suggesting are already integrated into a
>packaged configuration.  But maybe you can use a nugget or two from what
>I've written.  Good luck and happy hacking.
>Kent        
>
>  
>
In-depth sharing of your experience with links to resources is very much 
appreciated. The system that you
have described is very much what I have in mind except that it's not 
wireless. I will do a custom reinstall
which will give me the base installation from which I can work my way up 
to getting the system
I also note another thread on running Ubuntu on low memory systems which 
applies to me as I am
doing an installation on an old PC.

In addition I would like to customize the desktop such that upon 
booting, the system fires up X-Windows
with the display of our library logo and only two menus - catalogue 
browsing and user guide.
I can configure the Apache web server (which is what we are using) to 
deliver a page in Firefox
with the two menus which would be a quick and easy workaround.

A more challening option is to customize the Ubuntu desktop to provide 
the two menus. Clicking on either would
fire up Firefox to display the appropriate pages. But I will have to 
look up one of the proposed window
managers to see if that functionality is already provided.

Alfred,