Linux/Firefox Kiosk
I was surprised that no linux and firefox-based kiosk live CD exists in the wild. It seems like a natural and not-so-difficult thing to do. I was even more surprised at the lack of current kiosk solutions for firefox. I expected an extension or something at least.
But it's not as dismal as all that, really. Andrew Mutch's Firefox kiosk
browser page is a bit out
of date but works great nonetheless, if you can figure out the one key bit of
information that seems to be missing everywhere. That bit of information may
only apply if you hold the same assumption that I did, which may be a
completely illogical assumption: that you should be able to do this on a
per-profile basis. Based on that assumption, I was trying to put browser.jar in
~/.firefox/default/pe7v3yzq.slt/chrome/ instead of
/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/chrome/browser.jar. It just wasn't working, and
google was no help. It wasn't until my brain kicked into gear and I tried
locate browser.jar to figure out that this had to go in the global chrome
directory, that things fell into place.
If you want, you can still have a normal version of the browser installed, and run a kiosk Firefox—just download a copy of Firefox and install it into some directory, and replace its browser.jar with the one from Mutch's site.
Setting up the kiosk is simple enough: run normal Firefox to create and
configure the kiosk profile (firefox -ProfileManager, call it kiosk). Disable
the bookmarks toolbar, it will just take up space in the kiosk. Set your proxy
and javascript settings and whatever else you want, then quit Firefox. Start
your kiosk firefox (./firefox -P kiosk)
I'm working out the kinks in an FVWM setup for the window manager which will
make things tight enough that users can't get to things they shouldn't without
having to uninstall everything useful from the box. When I'm done I could
probably distribute a tarball that would take care of the .xsession, FVWM
configs, and kiosk stuff that could be slapped on top of a fresh Ubuntu
install. If you want that, spur me on.