Ubuntu Kiosk?

[email.listen at googlemail.com]

Am Wed, 10. May 2006 20:36 schrieb Daniel Carrera:
> Hello,
>
> A local school is interested in trying out Linux. I will setup a room
> with thin clients running from an Edubuntu server. I just have one
> concern: Last year I did this with another school. I setup a single user
> account which all the students shared. This worked alright except for
> OpenOffice. If two students started OpenOffice the second one would see
> an error saying that OOo was running. I never found a solution for this.
>
> I'd like to setup something Kiosk-style. I don't want to hand out 600
> user names and passwords. I have no idea how to setup a thin client
> Kiosk. Any suggestions? Can anyone point me in the right direction?

KDE kiosktool is what you are looking for.

kiosktool 
Description: tool to configure the KDE kiosk framework
 A Point&Click tool for system administrators to enable
 KDE's KIOSK features or otherwise preconfigure KDE for
 groups of users.

E.g. it is used by cosmopod.com to restrict the user desktop for their 
nomachine accounts.

For a single classromm and not more than 20 pupils systems like skolelinux, 
RedHat K12 or edubuntu will cope your needs. I would recomend skolelinux or 
K12 because they offer a lot of 'automagically' predefined services as user 
accounts stored in ldap, centralised administration and others.

But for a more complex environment, eg. several classrooms and a lot of users 
you will see that they lack a lot of performance. This mostly because of 
network limitations (not more than one subnet) and because of the use of LTSP 
which has a bigger bandwith footprint than nomachine/NX.

For such environment I would suggest a better scaling systems e.g. OpenSchool 
Server (OSS) [1] from EXTIS (OSS is the former SUSE OSS). 
OSS offers a lot of predefined services, those offered by skolelinux, k12 plus 
groupware, elearning environment and others.

It don't offer a preconfigured LTSP. But I don't see this as a disadvantage, 
IMHO it's more an advantqage...

I set up such a system with an nomachine service (wich is easy to set up) As 
thin-client systems I used thinstation [2]. Thinstation is a linux based 
terminal client system which allows connections to nomachine, Cisco Terminal 
Services,  MS Terminal Server and a lot others. So it is much more flexible 
than having LTSP only.

This system is serving a big vocational school /Berufsschule, BBS-II), 24 
classrooms having 12 to 24 machines each. And it is serving more than 2500 
user accounts in the moment. Every student has a personalized home directory, 
is able to use email, irc, web,... The system and all of its services can be 
used from inside the school and from outside the school, e.g. at home.

Plus a big set of squidgard rules for web access, which is a legal must here 
in germany to protect pupils.

Not to forget the use of kiosktool to configure/restrict the users desktop.
The desktop predefinition/restriction is group based so that there is a better  
flexibility in giving more functionality over the years.


regards,
thomas

[1] http://www.openschoolserver.net/
[2] http://www.thinstation.org/