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Diskless Linux Kiosks
joestump98 writes: "JWZ (of Netscape and Mozilla fame) has put up an extremely interesting article about using ThinkNic diskless workstations as internet kiosks at his new club, DNA Lounge. Very cool stuff!"
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I think things like these could be a great idea for places like public schools and libraries. These places spend a fortune on computers when they could get some of these and maybe someone could tweak the CD to include some sort of office suite (K-Office, Open Office, etc.) and you would have all any student would need for basic internet use and have the tools to also write papers for classes. I know this would not work for higher end apps such as graphics manipulation and the sort but it could save a lot of public $$.
"If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?"
I do this at work, although they're not diskless iMacs they do have preferences and such stored centrally. While it seems like a great solution it's really not because of the whole netboot thing. For some inexplicable reason, the iMacs have to constantly hit the network even for simple things like loading a webpage. We have a total of only four iMacs connected to the server, and not even stressing it much, but even browsing the internet slows the things to such a crawl that I get constant complaints about iMac speed. Open up a second or third browser window and the things become almost unusable.
Mac OSX isn't supported yet for netbooting or Macintosh Manager, so you can't get a modern OS running these things even though it would solve a lot (if not all) of the problems, although later in the year they should be there. But as it stands now, this is a really bad idea that I don't recommend it to anyone simply because it'll just piss off the users and make them hate Macs more. It's so bad that we're moving over to NFS for remote file access (also need to give PC's equal access via Samba) and doing all the multi-user stuff locally.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
(read it a few times before modding it down).
Got Rhinos?
Its just for using netscape for crying out loud!
Here's directions for it: double-click netscape. use netscape's common interface.
If they can't figure that out then they haven't been using a computer before anyway.
obviously an internet kiosk is going to have some simple icons and such for the windows users to do.
I am in charge of a SunRay system for a hotel / conference center. We have a total of 120 SunRay systems which are broken up into ~100 guest rooms and 15 public kiosks plus some for me to play around with :). I have almost no complaints about the interface, which just consists of cde with one button, netscape. And since there is some code running to bring netscape up if it crashes, or is closed, most people don't even need to use that button. We give the guests access to some kde games by using a perl script and a web page. The guest is presented with a short description of the games, and if they would like to play one they click on a link. Pretty straightforward.
The moral is that it doesn't matter what it is running behind the scenes as long as the interface they are presented with is good. If you plan to drop them into a vanilla kde, gnome, window maker, etc.. desktop, then people will be confused. But, people don't need all that stuff on a kiosk, they don't care if you do have a phases of the moon program, or a utility to tell them how the system resources are doing. Just set them up with the bare essentials, which in my experience is netscape and a web based email client and a short explanation of how to use it. (I have found imp (www.horde.org/imp) is an excellent choice. It supports pop3 and imap and can be set up with a stock list of email servers or let the guest enter their own. Make sure to tell them that this is not a supported feature, and if they don't know how to get to their email, then they should contact their technical support, not yours.)
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
First of all, it would be trivial to present users with a simplistic interface having 6 or 7 icons for basic applications, then another for "Full System Access" which would grant the user the as complete a level of access as JWZ sees fit. As the previous poster mentioned, most kiosk users are inclined to check stocks, perhaps send an email or two using the webmail system of their preference, and that's about it.
This functionality will exist for that market ssegment however there will be additional functionality agailable for the geeks who someone else pointed out will be frequenting the club. The system will probably work quite well and those of us who are routinely annoyed by the lack of funtionality of treditional kiosks will have more flexibility.
One minor and trivial issue that I didn't see mentioned (I may have just missed it) was a system state reset on a period of inactivity. This may not include a reboot, but simply a reset to a standard opening state, like the afore mentioned simplified interface, such that when a geek leaves the kiosk without resetting it (like that would ever happen) the next user wouldn't be thrown into an enviroment which would be confusing or not useful to that less technical person. This could be setup as a screensaver, perhaps it would work as an extension of XScreenSaver, but there would have to be such a mechanism, or an easy hardware reset, but as I said before such a hardware reset would probably take a while (especially booting a kernel and mounting everything over the network (On a P200, I don't know how much time that would take...)
--CTH
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Strange because its on a CD!
Whats special about JWZ's project is that he did it via a network and he gave great instructions to do so.
The Lottery:
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
At the bank I work at, we tried going the diskless kiosk route with spotty success. The environment we have in our 1300 branches is currently OS/2 RIPL'd PCs running a fixed set of apps on a locked-down desktop. Essentially, this is a network station kiosk in function.
Obviously, we're looking to get off OS/2 - yet still maintain the spirit of network-booting, locked down environment. We pilotted some IBM Network Station devices. Essentially, these are Unix kiosks - some highlights:
The devices (and Unix kiosk concept) worked really well for us. However, we chose not to implement them for the simple fact that no swapping capability exists. That is, the diskless device, by definition, supports a flat memory model. Therefore, new apps that are introduced there must be analyzed for memory requirements and the RAM must be adjusted accordingly. In our bank, where existing apps change and new apps get introduced regularly, the flat-memory model was not acceptable.
However, for true public kiosk applications where the app profile does not change with any kind frequency, I think the diskless kiosk notion can work very well.
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.