[nycbug-talk] *BSD Kiosk

[marco at metm.org]

Yes thanks for following up on this George.  

There are ways of doing this using [xgk]dm, but I was kind of hoping for
something as striped down as possible.  The need is for really simple
applications, on relatively old hardware so the lighter the better.
Right now all I need is a movie player that comes up when the machine is
booted and to bring the machine down when a single key on the keyboard
is clicked.

I have xinit set up to launch mplayer and all the keys in mplayer mapped
to quit.  Quitting mplayer will take down the X session.

I had done a kiosk before on linux by setting up a startup script which would
launch xinit and on the next line shutdown -h now.  xinit runs in a loop
so until it is quit the shutdown line won't get called.

FreeBSD 5.3 has a different syntax for the init scripts, which I haven't
had time to look over yet.

I was also looking at /etc/ttys which seems like one should be able to
launch arbitrary commands instead of the getty.  I tried a couple
combinations of login and xinit but none worked (surely because of my
error).  It seems like ttys would be a quick and dirty way of going
about this.

Any ideas or better practices are welcome,

Should I look at jails ? 
Seems more complicated than I need.

Thanks,

-- 
Marco


On Fri, Nov 12, 2004 at 08:54:23PM -0500, G. Rosamond wrote:
>So Marco's question about automatic logins and X was really about 
>building a *BSD kiosk. . .
>
>Anyone have any experiences with doing bsd kiosks?
>
>I'm starting my google search now. . .Freshports show nothing. . .
>
>Freshmeat shows three projects that aren't too relevant for the 
>stand-alone OS. . .
>
>It might be useful to put together some documentation and submit to the 
>documentation projects. . . Marc, it might be time for your wiki, or a 
>cvs server. . .
>
>g
>
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