Before I go to bed, I heard it mentioned that rather than a powerpoint or videos going on on the tv screen in the lobby, it may be using like a screensaver or such to display just static images. And I did have a bit of a suggestion regarding that, one thing I thought of looking at the current setup, it's pretty insecure, in that really anything could be done to that laptop.

A more flexible solution I thought of is to install a simple and minimal linux install, which would only really start an X server and have say a script that just changes the root window background every X seconds. I have already written such a script, which also supports having it be randomized as well. The flexibility of this approach is that we could lock it down, removing access to any of the mod keys and whatever else within the x server, so you couldn't really do anything with the box, and it could be administered remotely.

The wireless dongle that we have installed also has linux drivers I noticed as I was downloading the windows ones.

Another advantage is we could add or remove images at will, utilizing say ssh or rsync or ftp or really anything to be able to easily change the images. Or even setting up a web interface somewhere where people could submit their images to be displayed which could either just be automatically put up, or checked first with a human, and be updated almost instantaneously using the wireless with a cron script or whatever.

Another advantage to the approach is I did a quick check, and it was possible via the command line to give a url which would be rendered using webkit and put into an image, so really any webpage could also be put up there, and have it update every 5 minutes or whatever. So we could have polls or webpages or really anything else put into it that we could administer remotely, and I think this would greatly increase the flexibility of the "kiosk" that it is. And, as I said, we could install really any linux and make it pretty well protected from tampering, at least as well as could be expected given physical access, and there may be less foul play. We could even script videos to play or anything else.

As I said, this does seem doable, and I could certainly likely put together something at least that would be the linux client side, minus any server content, within about a week or so. Linux could really be any distro, I like gentoo due to how much you can mold it, but it could really be any variant of linux, and really once you set it up, maintainance would be little more than applying security patches. So could really be configured via anything, gentoo, redhat, ubuntu, debian, slackware, etc... All would be fairly standard setup, x server, some utilities to handle the background changing and such, and say a firewall. And given physical access, it would be hard to touch the box minus booting into a livecd, but you could always protect the bios. Don't know, just an idea to put out there that I thought of putting out there. Obviously this would just be the linux client stuff, but you could easily have any number of ways of managing the images, either directly accessing the machine or via a remote server. Anyway, let me know what you think.

Joshua Gwinn