On Thursday 24 April 2008 17:14, Kai Ponte wrote:
I have a potential applicaion for openSUSE in my work environment.
In our lobby we have several PCs (currently running XP) that we need to allow the public to access.
I want to create a secure browser experience where the browser is the only application available. (This is easy with Wintendo.) I also want to only have the browser be able to reach certian sites. (There is a whitelist I can provide.) IIRC, Wintendo has a kiosk mode but that only allows one site.
A simple and efficient approach would be to use xulrunner (a stripped-down
version of Firefox) and a very basic window manager (e.g., blackbox) with
most menus disabled. xulrunner is what we use for online product registration
during installation.
One thing you will find very hard to implement, however, is to enforce
browsing only to the whitelisted sites. You'd basically have to disable all
hyperlinks in the target pages (unrealistic) or use a very stringent firewall
setup that blocks access even on the network level.
There are also very fancy versions of the major desktops in "kiosk mode". KDE
for example has such a kiosk mode. But for your application that is probably
overkill; you don't need all the features KDE provides for just running a
browser.
See also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xulrunner
CU
--
Stefan Hundhammer