Porteus Kiosk Edition v2.0 beta

[fanthom]

The Porteus Community is pleased to announce the beta release of Porteus Kiosk Edition. This is the first Porteus release based on Slackware-14.0, with the addition of kernel 3.6.1 and Firefox-15.0.1. This is a 32-bit system which is entirely locked down to prevent tampering with any of the components (including the browser), making this a perfect fit for kiosks and other publicly available web terminals. The ISO is 34MB and contains only the libraries and utilities which are required to launch Firefox. Additional software may bring along security risks and affect stability in a restricted environment which is why we have removed everything else from this edition.

Porteus Kiosk Edition features include:
- Safety: the kiosk edition can be booted only from the iso9660 filesystem, which is read-only by design (preventing any persistent modifications to the system). Shell terminals and VT switching are disabled. Admin and guest passwords are extremely strong, created randomly and are not known to anyone, even the kiosk creators.
- Privacy: all personal user data is wiped each time firefox is restarted.
- Small footprint: the kiosk edition should run well on a PC with only 128MB of RAM (when the copy2ram feature is disabled).
- Speed: the kiosk edition loads into RAM by default, offering a robust and incredibly fast user experience.
- Customizable: you can tweak settings, passwords, etc. through our "Kiosk Wizard" tool or make changes manually as the administrator (additional modules and the "rootcopy" folder are still supported in the kiosk edition).

You can download a fully working ISO here:

kiosk ISO
md5sum: ad3b3d87e58fa08a03dcad68659c88b2

Unlike our other editions, this ISO is a 'hybrid' ISO, which means that it can be burned to a CD as usual, or it can be "burned" directly to a flash device or hard drive using the following command:

Code: Select all

dd if=porteus-kiosk-v2.0-beta-i486.iso of=/dev/sdb

where 'dev/sdb' is the target flash device. Note that this will overwrite the device's Master Boot Record (MBR), so any existing operating systems on that device will no longer boot, and existing data may be overwritten as well. Also note that this command will not work if you specify a partition number (e.g. /dev/sdb1), as 'dd' must start writing to the MBR of the device itself. Once you've executed this command, the drive will be bootable and no further steps are required to complete the installation.

Customizing the Porteus Kiosk Edition

The "Kiosk Wizard" was developed for the purpose of making changes to the default kiosk ISO in a safe, controlled manner. This cross-distro wizard should run from any linux distribution (including Porteus), by downloading this file:

kiosk wizard
md5sum: c013951e3c884ea5b2b6958749be73ee

making it executable (chmod +x filename) and then executing it. This is a self-extracting archive which launches the wizard and runs a check to make sure all required programs are installed on your system before downloading and customizing the kiosk ISO. Currently, the wizard lets you perform the following actions:
- change root/guest/firefox passwords
- set the default home page for firefox
- disable copy2ram mode
- disable the firewall
- set default keyboard mapping
- download the optional flash-player and wireless components
- enable static IP and/or wireless networking (WPA/WPA2, WEP, OPEN network)
- create a new hybrid ISO which can be burned to a CD, usb drive, flash card, hard drive, etc.

When you boot the system, you are logged in to openbox and firefox is started up, with all right-click and other navigation menus removed to prevent access to any system settings.

For more information on getting started with Porteus Kiosk Edition, go here:
link

We're looking for bug reports and user suggestions, so please download it and let us know if you run into any trouble. Please post your findings to this thread:
link

Thanks for your help!