Configuring FreeBSD for use as an interactive kiosk

[Andy Reitz]

On Thu, 8 Jun 2006 drseuk at droog.sdf-eu.org wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm involved with a museum which has a standalone interactive kiosk. The
> system runs an Apache2 server with PHP and MySQL on Windows XP. The
> problem is that Windows XP keeps becoming corrupted as a result of the
> machine being switched on and off at random (by staff, kids etc.).
>
> Currently, the museum management is very open to switching to FreeBSD or
> similar - provided I can *completely* bulletproof the box against
> arbitrary power-cycling (I can't always be there to manually run fsck
> etc.).
>
> I'd welcome any advice and suggestions about how to do this. Currently the
> information on the system is updated in situ so the file systems can't
> be made read only (any ideas on how we could split the updating from the
> deployment welcome). We also need to find a way of turning firefox into a
> kiosk browser.

Hi drseuk,

Well, the best thing to do would be to make your kiosk machine totally
diskless:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-diskless.html

This would make the kiosk machine totally resilient to unexpected reboots.

However, it sounds like you only have one machine, and you have to make
everything work there. In that case, you might be able to experiment with
making certain file systems read-only, and only making them RW when you
want to modify the system.

It looks like some work has been done with getting Firefox to work in
kiosk mode, here is what Google turned up for me:

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6013296355.html

Good luck,
	-Andy Reitz.