Re: Multimedia Kiosk - Marketing Display

Hmm I hoped someone who knows this better would step up and answer James' 
questions while I didn't have the time...

On Wednesday 04 January 2006 20:37, James Stout wrote:
> We are currently able to schedule the content (i.e. start playing on X
> date / stop playing on Y date).
>
> This is currently working on the windows setup.  As I stated above, I've
> not really gone far past the 'planning' stages.  As far as this
> functionality goes, I'm not overly concerned.  If the system were able to
> basically create a play queue using all files in particular directory, then
> this same control can be exercised manually by adding/removing files to
> that directory.  I understand that some of these features will be beyond
> what I can get from this list, I only meant to describe how our system
> currently operates as a basis for what we would like, not an expectation
> for exact duplication of each function.

It's easy to script anyway, at least for videos. And I guess KPresenter is 
quite easy to script remotely through the DCOP interface if you want to 
script a presentation.

> > We are able to schedule what hours per day the kiosk is in operation. 
> > i.e. it displays content from 6 am to 11:59 pm.

Can be as simple as a cron job that tells the desktop to log off gracefully 
(or non-gracefully) at the required time. If you're not familiar with cron 
yet, take a look at the manual pages ('man cron' in the shell, or man:cron in 
Konqueror for a graphical version) or pick a book on Unix. Any book will do, 
it's about 30 year old technology :)

Once you've all this working you can start working on the real kiosk-related 
part: locking down the whole system. Be sure to pick applications that CAN be 
locked down if you need that. Besides most KDE applications I am only aware 
of Firefox to have some lockdown options. Given that this list is about KDE I 
obviously have a limited view though, and there may be many more apps out 
there. This list probably can't support you with them though.

-- 
Martijn