Testing kPup 2.14 - Kiosk Puplet

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Todd
Posts: 311
Joined: Thu 31 Aug 2006, 18:25

Testing kPup 2.14 - Kiosk Puplet

#1 Post by Todd »

I am working on a Kiosk puplet. It is a version of Litepup that boots directly to Firefox. I have an acquaintance for whom I am creating this. Please let me know how I can improve it.

http://www.toddrichardson.com/kpup/

Sincerely,

Todd Richardson

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Skimmel
Posts: 27
Joined: Mon 07 May 2007, 18:39
Location: Houston, TX

Kiosk Browser

#2 Post by Skimmel »

Todd,

For the kiosk browser work I've done, I selected Opera rather than Firefox and I've been very pleased with that. Opera has several built in command line option switches that take a lot of the work out of setting up a kiosk browser and I found Opera to be a lot easier to customize.

One key to a kiosk browser is that the user shouldn't be able to get out of the browser and into the system at all. Obviously you still have to eliminate that possibility. Opera does that automatically in Kiosk Mode.

Another aspect is that you want to give the user an easy way to get to the pre-selected set of web sites but no others. I did that by creating special buttons that sat in the toolbar area. In Opera I had easy and complete control of what buttons would be available to the user and which would not be available.

And a Kiosk browser needs to return to the home page if unused for a long time.

satman
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon 28 May 2007, 14:56

#3 Post by satman »

Hello Skimmel,

i also tryed to setup opera in Kiosk Mode. It works fine but everytime i set the Startup page to "Start with home page" or "Start with blank page" Kiosk Mode is disabled. At "Continue from last time" ther is no Problem.
Did you have the same problem !?

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Skimmel
Posts: 27
Joined: Mon 07 May 2007, 18:39
Location: Houston, TX

Invoking Opera in Kiosk mode

#4 Post by Skimmel »

I've taken to starting Opera with a script that reads something like:

Code: Select all

#! /bin/sh
opera http://www.yahoo.com -k -fullscreen -nomenu -nosysmenu
As such, it goes to the page I specify and the issue of restarting doesn't happen. I wanted to leave the user with as few confusing questions as possible.

Fullscreen is the issue that is giving me the most heartache as it just doesn't seem to work the way I expect.

satman
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon 28 May 2007, 14:56

#5 Post by satman »

Thank you Skimmel for your fast reply.
I run Opera the same way as you. The only difference is that i need the URL input field and the navigate buttons so i use the switch -kioskbuttons. With your solution to put the start URL to the script, everything looks fine. But the URL field is write protected. Why is that Opera under Linux so buggy !!?? :evil:

Than you , Satman

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Skimmel
Posts: 27
Joined: Mon 07 May 2007, 18:39
Location: Houston, TX

#6 Post by Skimmel »

Satman,

I wanted to restrict where the user could go to a limited set of urls. What I did was create my own set of buttons to populate the top bar that would automatically take the user to the 20 or however many sites I could allow them.

At least it all worked that way when I set it up using windoze. The linux version of Opera is a bit more difficult to work with. Options that worked just fine in windoze don't seem to work at all in Linux.

Skimmel

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