Setting up a Kiosk station?

[mcvickj]

Is there anyone who has some experience setting up a kiosk station using Linux? Is there some type of package / distro I should be looknig at? Most of our *nix servers are Debian but I have also used Ubuntu. I was considering Ubuntu for the kiosk stations.

This will be in a library environment. The computers in question would be something from the Dell OptiPlex line. We currently have GX620, 755 and 760 in service.

I would want to give the users access to Firefox, Open Office, GIMP and some type of burning software. Will also need to be able to mount / unmount a USB pen drive to save documents. Everything else should be locked down.

Then I would also need to look at something for mass duplication. Currently using Symantec Ghost 8.3 for our imaging needs. Running a DD on an 80GB HD x 40+ computers would be pretty time consuming. Is there a better way?

 

[skyking]

acronis works OK with linux partitions. The image will be about 2.5 Gb at the most.
I have not set up a kiosk. It seems like it would take a while to get the image right with the permissions you need but it would be easy after that.

 

[Nothinman]

Depending on your requirements you could just use a LiveCD: http://jadoba.net/kiosks/firefox/

 

[Fallen Kell]

I second the LiveCD distributions. Several have kiosk modes and can even install to hard drive in kiosk mode. I know I hacked appart the installation of one of the liveCD distributions and basically had it treat the hard drive as if it was a CD with the OS partition simply containing the same data that would have been on the CD and I messed around with the init scripts so that it never mounted the disk partition in read-write mode, but instead used the same ramfs solution that the live CD distribution used when booting from the CD. Doing something like that and putting it into a kiosk mode (using a boot option in GRUB or whatever boot loader that you use) would probably get you 99% of the way there.

Most things would be fixable with a simple reboot. The user would need to gain root and remount the disk into read write mode to write anything to the disk, however, he/she would not be able to change the actual OS and how it operates unless he knows the proceedure on how to create a custom live CD distribution and replaced the main compressed filesystem image file on the hard drive with their own custom version (in other words a LOT of work for very little gain).