Kios for a marketing Live CD?

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Kios for a marketing Live CD?
by Henrik on Wednesday 11/Aug/2004, @13:56

I wonder if a Kios configuration might be suitable for a Knoppix (or similar) CD intended for the absolutely inexperienced Linux users? The point is that we really don't want them to be able to do anything silly like re-partition their hard drive. We recently made a simplified version of Knoppix 3.4 for Software Freedom Day, where we basically cleaned away some of the more dangerous menu entries, and made it all a bit more user friendly, but that's not quite enough.

You can see screenshots here: http://softwarefreedomday.org/knoppix/screenshots/
and read more here: http://theopencd.sunsite.dk/1_4_1_releasesd.html (where there is also a bittorrent link for the ISO)

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Re: Kios for a marketing Live CD?
by Henrik on Wednesday 11/Aug/2004, @14:12

Ooops. I misspelled Kiosk. Twice! Embarrassing! doubly so because it also shows I'm not using Konqueror with it's spell-checking at the moment :)

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Re: Kios for a marketing Live CD?
by Anonymous on Wednesday 11/Aug/2004, @21:07

With what part of KDE can you do repartitioning? Of course you can disable with Kiosk any access to shells, but then you could also delete fdisk?

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Re: Kios for a marketing Live CD?
by anno on Thursday 12/Aug/2004, @00:08

How about Qtparted or other tools from the menu?
Kiosk is about disabling the direct access for the normal user not about complete absolut security against any kind of hacker.

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Re: Kiosk for a marketing Live CD?
by Henrik on Thursday 12/Aug/2004, @02:22

Right, so that's what we've done. We've removed Qtparted from the menu, but it's still on the system as is fdisk. Both should be removed. The easiest might just be to keep the root password secret from the casual user and not give root shell access. That way they won't be able to launch things like fdisk, or even mount the Windows drives in write mode.

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Re: Kiosk for a marketing Live CD?
by Ian Monroe on Thursday 12/Aug/2004, @06:18

Or its probably possible to hide the hard drives at the kernel level, seems like I've seen boot options that can do this. Then you wouldn't have to worry about it at all. Really Kiosk doesn't make since for a Live CD (since most changes are lost on reboot regardless), unless the Live CD wanted to be used to demo kiosk.

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