(Seemingly) simple "restart program" question

[Darrell]

Hi Folks --

Just loaded Kubuntu Dapper and am beginning to play. I fooled around with Linux about 5 years ago, but now I need to get some work done I am trying to implement a Firefox kiosk browser for my public library. I have learned quite a bit about the Firefox interface, but the solution to a simple problem escapes me.

I need to structure the browser so that whenever someone closes it, either by the "exit" button or the Alt- key combination, Firefox promptly opens again. Failing that, I need to password the "close" function so that only staff can shut the browser down.

Any ideas from the gurus here?? Thanx in advance.

Darrell Eifert
Lane Memorial Library, Hampton, NH

[Nirvana]

Re: (Seemingly) simple "restart program" question

I don't know how to the your way. But the way I've seen a kiosk set up was that they make the Kicker not writable (so you can't move anything/delete stuff) and then place commonly used icons on the desktop and the user cannot rm anything from the terminal because user accounts have 0 privelledges.

Here are some guides:
http://kiosk.mozdev.org/ --> kiosk style for the Mozilla browser
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7718 --> create a kiosk out of KDE (some of the things I said above were in that guide)

Also, after looking at the bottom portion of that guide... there is a KDE kiosk config tool called kiosktool. To obtain:

sudo apt-get install kiosktool

[Darrell]

Re: (Seemingly) simple "restart program" question

Thanks for the links -- the bit from LJ about limiting URLs might come in very handy, especially for a browser that is limited to running an on-line catalog. The KIOSK admin tool also looks worth exploring.

If anyone has a simple script for "freezing" an open app so that it cannot be closed except via a password, I would still be interested ...

Cheers,
-- Darrell