/[http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDE+Community+World+Summit|aKademy] / [http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Talks+@+aKademy|Talks] / Kiosk Talk

-=Kiosk by Waldo Bastian=-

This is Waldo, he's been working on KDE for the last 6 years, working for SuSE for the last 5.

KDE is really a versatile environment, you can do a lot of things with it such as... change the wallpaper.  You an move icons around or remove them.  Icons on the desktop can be moved around or removed.  You have a lot of possibilities and flexibility.

Starts up Kiosk admin tool.  The concept of Kiosk admin tool is based on profiles.  

Shows a picture of a lot of children.  They are from a school is Denmark which uses KDE with Kiosk.  The teachers should be able to do different things from the school children.  Uses kiosk to assign a user a profile.  Then he assigns a unix group a profile.  In the profile he opens the dialogue to set a desktop background and chooses a nice "kids" wallpaper.

Now he logs in a child and the new wallpaper is used.  Then he changes the wallpaper to something else, but what if the teacher thinks this changed wallpaper is not appropriate for young children?  So he uses Kiosk to lock down the wallpaper and now the child user doesn't get an option to change the wallpaper.  Even if they were clever and edited the configuration files it wouldn't help.

Back with kiosk he puts some icons on the desktop in the usual way, kiosk temporarily replaces the users desktop with the desktop of the kiosk user so you can set the kiosk users's desktop by interacting with it in the same way as your normal desktop.  He logs in as a child and gets these icons.  Back in Kiosk he adds an icon to the desktop and the child user's desktop gets the icon straight away.

Not everything you can do with the Kiosk framework is possible with the admin tool.  The admin tool does the most important bits.

You can turn off the ability to run any application that requires root access.  You can disable access to a command shell.  You can disable screen lock.