[nycbug-talk] *BSD Kiosk

[Jesse Callaway]

On Nov 13, 2004, at 1:04 AM, marco at metm.org wrote:

> 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.
>

yeah, the tty's. Nothing came of this? What happened when you booted 
up? You got login? or did you get a dying xinit? I think this is how 
the aforementioned graphical login thing works. The desktop managers or 
whatever. I just have a green-screen and haven't run X in a while, 
sorry if this is of no encouragement.


> 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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