I have made a clean install of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Desktop and now want's to convert it into a kiosk with a full screen webbrowser.
This was previously done in 10.04 and worked perfect, but due to hardware changes (graphics) we are forced to use version 14.04.
I have created a kiosk.desktop in /usr/share/xsessions
and a shell script called kiosk.sh
that launches firefox with r-kiosk
installed. The shell script is executable.
A user called "kiosk" is set to autologin (in /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
).
But now i'm stuck. I'm want the kiosk.sh
to be run when the kiosk user session is started.
In previous versions this could be done in the GUI tool "Login Screen Settings" or in /usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/50-ubuntu.conf
.
I have changed 50-ubuntu.conf
to "user-session=kiosk"
but it doesn't start.
The "Login Screen Settings" tool can't be found. Has it been replaced by another utility in 14.04?
Placing a kiosk.sh.desktop
in ~/kiosk/.config/autostart works
, but the gnome-desktop is shown before firefox starts in fullscreen mode making it possible for the users to interact with the desktop.
What is to correct/best way to start firefox in fullscreen after user autologin?
Thanks
Thomas
Best Answer
I'd personally side-step all the
lightdm
andXsession
stuff and just launch my own instance of X that just started Firefox. Sounds nightmarish but it's really simple with a little Upstart scriptObviously change the username to whatever user you want to run this as, but that's pretty much it. Save that as
/etc/init/x.conf
and then you should be able tosudo start x
and you're away (it'll load at boot). If Firefox crashes, it'll reload X with a new instance.If you've got a full-blown Ubuntu install sitting there, you might have to disable LightDM first with:
And your Firefox profile is completely up to you. You might even want to script in some profile-restoration so that if somebody does break your profile, you just need to restart your
x
service and it'll be using the clean copy again. Just an idea.I've since written a blog post on creating a Kiosk from scratch with 14.04 and Chrome.
For your wireless configuration problem, I'd suggest keeping as much of this away from casual users. You could set up a connection using a TTY fairly simply:
That should add the connection to the system and connect (and auto-connect in the future) but I haven't tested it. It might not even need the
sudo
but that all depends on what privileges your main user has.The simple benefit over loading something else in the background here is that there's no chance some passer-by is going to have access to a graphical network settings dialogue. It does require the operator to be able to follow instructions.
If they can't handle that, you could fairly easily modify your
kiosk.sh
to look for existing connections and ask somezenity
-questions that feed into the previousnmcli
command:That's just a rough idea. You'll need to work on that. There may be a better standalone graphical network-manager configuration application.