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Revival of an Oldie but Goodie: Kiosk's Possible Return?

I have a confession to make. Sometimes, even when you've been trained in the intricacies of searching every database known to man, you can still outright miss really obvious things in a simple Google search. When I was fresh out of library school, I resurrected one of the library's catalog terminals, an old Bondi Blue iMac, with Yellow Dog Linux and KDE. I spent days locking down the KDE desktop, so that if the browser displaying the catalog was somehow shut down (or crashed) it would automatically restart. I spent a few more days making sure that most patrons couldn't access anything but the browser (never underestimate the general public, or the havoc that stray keystrokes, however innocent, can bring).

It wasn't that the KDE Kiosk tool didn't exist at the time. I simply missed it. Yes, I was a bad systems librarian for missing it, and then spending days (happily, but still...) locking down the desktop and reinventing the wheel.

With the release of KDE 4, Kiosk sadly fell into a state of limbo. Now, however, KDE developer Ian Geiser wants to bring it back to life on KDE 4.

If you've never used KDE's Kiosk and you work in a setting where it could be useful, it's well worth giving the old version a try if you've got a spare machine. Depending on your situation, using a distribution that's locked down with the KDE 3.x Kiosk tool might be quite sufficient and secure. Even if it's not something you'd prefer over the long term, it's a neat project and well worth some exploration now.

The Kiosk administration panel prompts systems administrators to create new accounts (and profiles) for the Kiosk deployment. Each profile can be locked down easily, through the graphical interface, allowing the administrator to restrict not only applications, but options within those applications. Can these things be done without the interface, singularly, by hand? Yes, yes, they can, and as I admitted earlier, I spent way too much time doing so. I did a good job, in the end, but believe me when I say the Kiosk tool was faster, easier, and thought of more areas that needed locking down than I did straight away.

We learn from mistakes, and I'd have to say my biggest mistake with that terminal wasn't looking just a bit harder at whether something like Kiosk existed.

Geiser's gotten the gears in motion for a fresh, updated, KDE 4 flavored Kiosk tool. He reports he just finished stripping the old code of the remaining KDE 3/Qt 3 compatibility codes, and has been looking at ways to make it easier for third party application developers to add their program's options to the Kiosk administration panel, as well as create further options for administrators to lock down their applications.

Geiser gives application developers further details on his blog about how easy this process is, and says that he welcomes developers' questions on Kiosk in a larger sense, the .kiosk file format, and making your program work smoothly in the Kiosk setting. He prefers contact via the #kde-devel channel on freenode (his handle is geiseri), and plans on documenting Kiosk for KDE 4's progress (and proposed features) on his developer blog. He hopes to have the Kiosk tool ready to ship in time for KDE's 4.3 release in July.

Kiosk is one of those utilities that many won't ever need, but is an absolute time (and sanity) saver for the many that actually do. It also, sadly, is one of those utilities that doesn't get a lot of publicity -- of all the users that potentially need it, a much smaller percentage are actually aware anything like it exists, already integrated into the desktop environment.

If you're interested in taking an older Kiosk for a spin on KDE 3.x, it is available through repositories that maintain KDE packages (it's an Extragear application) and source tarballs are still available through various mirrors.

• linux
• development
• KDE
• KDE4
• QT
• kiosk
• lockdown
• administration

by Aaron Seigo on Mar. 03, 2009

As way of clarification: Kiosk is the framework that does the user/group profiles. It is completely non-gui itself, though it hooks into the GUI in many places (e.g. config dialogs or menu bars). It was not left behind at any point an exists in KDE 4 as it did in KDE 3.

What did get left behind was the configuration GUI that makes it easy to configure many parts of the Kiosk system with a nice graphical system. That application is called Kiosk Tool, but its completely separate from Kiosk itself.

And yes, I'm glad that Kiosk Tool is making a come back as well. Hopefully it will end up prettier and more capable in KDE4 too. :)

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by Kristin Shoemaker on Mar. 03, 2009

Thanks Aaron. I wasn't aware of the fact Kiosk itself had made it to KDE 4 or how separable it was from the admin tool in earlier versions. Very cool, and thanks for the clarification! The whole Kiosk package has always been one that's made even people who *don't* need to use it say "Wow". It will be nice to see it together again.

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by Alan on Mar. 03, 2009

I'm glad to see this coming back, though I never could get it working to my satisfaction in kde3. Interestingly, I first used it for the same purpose as you (creating a library catalog browser), but I eventually came to the conclusion that it was far easier and more secure to take a barebones window manager and build the environment from the ground up than to take a full blown desktop environment and lock everything down.

Still, this is a good tool. Maybe next someone can link kiosk profiles to an LDAP directory and.... hmmm...

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